Sit still, be quiet, and get your wife a visa...

So, it's been a few months since my last post.  And I've missed a lot of opportunities to blog:
*I feverishly read Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life while on a ferry between Estonia and Finland
*I attended an intellectually stimulating conference (also in Estonia) of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature.
*I've done a lot of reading and research on stuff I'll be working on as a PhD student.

So what's my excuse?  I'm gonna blame the government.  Governments, actually.  The long, drawn out process of getting a visa for my wifely-doo was sucking my will to live from early May until just a few days ago.  That's a bit much, actually, but it was taking a lot of my time and mental energy - and the record does reflect that something was sucking away my will to blog, if nothing else.  Again, I blame the governments of the USA and ROK and perhaps bureaucracy in general.  Let me explain the process and hopefully you will sympathize rather than empathize...I don't want you to stop reading due to the soul-crushing tedium.

1st Period: Winter 2011
This was before I was married.  I had to declare, in various ways, to both the Korean Government and the US Embassy that I would be getting married.  This cost somewhere around $100, if memory serves.  In my simple little brain I assumed this meant that both governments would be able to draw the logic conclusions.  Well: Korea did but the US most decidedly did not.  This leads to the second period.

2nd Period: Winter/Spring 2012
For some reason, I had to declare - to a different part of the US Embassy - that the woman I had married was now my 'Alien Relative.'  I honestly don't see how I could marry a Korean and not have said spouse as an 'Alien Relative.'  It seems that some column in some government spreadsheet somewhere should've reflected the forms filed in the 1st period.  Charles Robinson: Married to Alien/Alien Relative --> YES  Something like that.  But no.  I had to fill out a form virtually identical to the the declaration of marriage form and pay another $300 dollars or so.  And this process was simply to make my wife eligible to apply for an immigration visa.

3rd Period Spring/Summer 2012
About a week after we filed the 'Alien Relative' declaration, my wife received an email with 'instructions' on how to apply for the visa.  They reminded me of those matrix puzzles we sometimes did in math classes in elementary and junior high school. ("John hates spaghetti and can't work on Tuesday evenings"; "Sally hates that John hates spaghetti and refuses to work any shift John doesnt't work"; "Mary wants to work on Wednesday mornings and paints pictures of unicorns in her spare time.")  And this is where our woes actually began in earnest.

The first problem was the medical stuff, which got drawn out and expensive-ized when the doctor mistook my wife's recent cough/cold/bronchitis for "possibly TB or Pneumonia."

As this drama progressed, the government also expressed vague distaste for my lack of (US) tax documents accurately reflecting my income.  It turns out that if I had concealed my Korean income completely, everything would be fine.  But since I 'declared' my Korean income with a document that the visa officer could read but couldn't accept, and since said officer couldn't 'unsee' the 'unacceptable' document, I had to spend about $400 dollars on a tax expert to sort out the tax issue.

But finally, we have the visa in hand and we will be on our way to the US in about a week .  I hope to blog more frequently as my graduate student life (re)commences, but we shall see.  Another thing to look for in the future is a new blog I may be starting with my friends from University of Chicago, but it is a little to soon to give any substantial details.

Until next time!

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself 
(Korean: 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다)
Young-ha Kim
(click here for author website)
Edition: Harvest Originals, 2007 (and Kindle)

Our unnamed narrator, begins by explaining his perverse aestheticization of suicide.  A chilling quote to represent his thought: "People who don't know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don't know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life" (6).  This is why he has devoted his professional life to creating beautiful suicides--finding, consoling, and finally organizing the suicides of his 'clients.'  The bulk of the novel is his elliptical and fragmented report about a group of people connected to one such client.  To demonstrate her centrality in the lives of her acquaintances, she has two names, Judith and Se-yeon and we see clearly how she energizes the lives of the narrator and two other men, named only 'C' and 'K.' 

I am now reading this book, over and over, as I've assigned it for my Reading and Discussion class at my university (I've paired it with Chang Ha-joon's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism--see the relevant post).  I originally read this book during the summer before I moved to Korea.  My impression at the time, as far as I remember, was shock.  I had already watched as many Korean films as I could get my hands on.  I had also worked through a major television drama, Tomato   (토마토).  The television show is from 1999, the novel from 1996.  Now I know all about South Korea's rich field of cultural production, but a few years ago, to a relatively inexperienced American, the contrast was amazing.  Watch this highlight video set to Tomato's theme song for a hint of what I mean



Let's define American pop culture with two examples: the Jonas Brothers and Marilyn Manson.  Or how about Friends and Kill Bill?  Confused and excited?  Well, that's the response I had when, in the same July, I watched this TV show and read this book.

As I'm reading it now, week by week, the book is taking on a new complexity as it teaches me exactly how much I have learned about Korea, about being a foreigner, and about the rise of what is called 'globalization' since moving to South Korea.

After the semester ends, I will sum up what I've tried to do with this book in my classes.  For now, I simply want to note that this is a deceptively simple book.  You can read it in a few hours, especially if you know nothing about Korea.  But, like any remarkable work of fiction, the more attention you invest in  I Have the Right, the more difficult it will become.

For now, my basic reading of the text is as follows.  I Have the Right is a kind of Nietzschean tone poem dropped by the author, like a bomb, on a South Korean scene (mid 90s, remember) just beginning to think about imagining to recover from (please note all the bet hedging!) several decades of dictatorship, beginning to publicly wonder about the doom of freedom, a la Sartre.  Whatever links one might draw between the dueling dictators of the North and South, the book would welcome.  One can't lose sight of the absented protagonist of the story, Judith/Se-yeon, an abused, disaffected sex-worker.  But for me the keyword is 'Nietzschean'--all the gloom, disaster, and pain pinpointed by the novel serve to point out the opportunity for empowerment any of us can grab when our starting point is the sudden realization:

OMG!  I have the right to destroy myself!

Truly, an adventure in sitting still and being quiet.