Another year has come and gone since I last wrote a Christmas newsletter and much has happened. I just can’t really remember what. I’m just kidding. Of course I can remember… some things.
The biggest event for us was
traveling to Korea as a family and living in Seoul for six weeks. Evan finished his mission in Busan in the middle of July, but I went over to teach at Korea University at the end of June and classes did not end until the 2nd week of August. It was an interesting experience. In exactly the same way that the survivors of Hurricane Katrina found their experience to be “interesting.” We stayed in a family apartment on the Korea University campus in their newest facility there, the CJ International House. I’ve stayed there in past summers in a studio apartment which resembles a broom closet with a bed, bathroom and stove. Actually, it’s nicer than that, but I have this strong need to be sarcastic. Apparently the Korean definition of a family is two midget parents and a single child, because the apartment had a small double bed in one room and an even smaller twin bed in the other. We put Alan in one bed, Joan on the couch and Lynn slept on the floor. We bought a couple of air mattresses to make things easy for her and they worked OK for the first few weeks. Toward the end they were usually flat by morning.
I have decided, with my famous 20/20 hindsight, that taking two adult women and a tween-age woman anywhere for six weeks without a job or classes or some other form of responsibility that eats up time, is a very, very bad idea. Unlike men, who are happy, wandering around aimlessly and looking at old musty temples and such, women (at least those with the genetic heritage in our nuclear family) can think of only one worthwhile leisure activity: shopping. So the trip, while enjoyable on some dimensions, was a bit on the expensive side. I’m sure it was money well-spent, but I don’t personally have any idea what it was spent on. I do remember eating, so I guess some of it went for that. But I sure don’t remember eating as much as the bank account indicates.
The best time to go to Korea, in my humble opinion, is the autumn when the leaves are changing. After that, the 2nd best time would be spring. Then maybe early summer, or winter. The absolute worst time to go is July. So, of course, that’s when we were there. It all makes a bit of perverse sense if you think about it long enough during the hot, humid Korean summer. The weather in late-June through early August consists of two seasons. The rainy season, when it is hot, humid and raining all the time and you wish it would stop raining just so you could see the sun. This is followed by the non-rainy season, when it is hot, humid, but not raining and you wish it WOULD rain again so that you didn’t have to go out in the sun. Because of this, several years ago when Koreans were first designing their educational calendar, they wisely left this time of year empty so that people could stay home and complain about the weather, rather than go to school and complain there. Despite the sarcasm, please note a deeper truth here: there is a reason why classes are not held this time of year. At Korea University an overpaid administrator, probably one with an air conditioned office, decided a few years ago that since the buildings on campus lie idle during this period, it would be a wonderful time to hold a summer school. This is where I fit in, because I got to teach classes during those six weeks.
Despite the heat, close quarters, expense of shopping for only the absolute necessities of life, and having one bathroom for three females, things went rather well. No one was seriously injured by anyone else and we succeeded in bringing Evan back in one piece.
On the way home we had a connecting flight through Honolulu with an 11-hour layover. We were hosted by our long-suffering friends from our days in Ann Arbor, the Huffs, who live there and who took us around and showed us the sites. We wandered around like sleep deprived zombies, because that is, in fact, what we were, but they put up with us anyway.
We did have other things happen this year. And some of them were even good. Here’s a partial rundown.
Kerk had knee surgery in January and discovered that he has a bad knee. Now, Kerk knew this before surgery. That is, after all, the reason he had knee surgery in the first place. Kerk’s doctor says he will need partial knee replacement one of these days. Kerk is simply tickled pink whenever he thinks about that. He is drawing a salary at BYU, because he has “tenure” and can’t be fired. He is coordinating the international relations degree and will be for another year and half. He is still serving as the scoutmaster in his ward, but believes a more accurate description of the calling would be, “cat herder.”
Yeongmi is still working at Noah Webster Academy, which is not really an academy; it’s our local charter school. She is working in the 5th grade. Last Spring she was awarded the prestigious and highly-coveted “
Teaching Aide of the Year” award. The award included a certificate and came with a generous stipend of one basket of cookies. She likes her job a lot. Really.
Evan is back from his mission and enrolled at BYU. He is trying to pick a major. He’s thinking of maybe dentistry or neuroscience or Korean or… you get the idea. He is studying better than he did the year before his mission, but that’s like saying he’s more honest than Bill Clinton. He spends a suspicious amount of time on his computer doing homework to the sounds of dying orcs. He calls it “multitasking”
Lynn is also enrolled at BYU and is pursuing an degree in public health with an emphasis in epidemiology. With the recession and massive layoffs and such, she has decided to bite the bullet and will be studying somewhere else in the spring: London. She is living, for now, in an apartment in Provo, but she just sold her contract and is considering one of three options: find another apartment or house in Provo, move back home with us, or live in an old refrigerator box down by the railroad.
Alan is in 8th grade and doing well in school. He is the deacons quorum president at church and gets to spend lots of time with his dad on Sundays and Wednesdays. He is taking French Horn like his older brother did, but unlike his older brother, he will be dropping it like a hot potato next term. He missed scout camp this summer because he was in Korea, and shed nary a tear. He did get to go to Timberline in June and spent a wonderful week huddled in the rain and snow on a mountainside learning how to be an effective youth leader. He is glad he went. Really.
Joan is in 6th grade and will be moving on to Junior High next fall. She turned twelve in October and goes to Young Women now. She prefers this to primary and was very, very, very glad when the primary program in sacrament meeting was scheduled for the week after her birthday. She does very well in school and is a member of the “scholar” council. They don’t have students at Noah Webster Academy, just scholars.
In sadder news,
Sammy, our cat of fifteen years passed away this fall. He got very sick at the end and his kidneys failed, so we had to put him down. Lynn and I went with him to the vet and stayed with him ‘til the end, It was hard.
In happier news, Joan got two kittens this spring. They are littermates and we named them Moki (after a character from Johnny Lingo) and Midna (after a character from the Zelda videogames). They are now fully grown, but haven’t gotten so grumpy that they won’t chase cat toys yet.
All is generally well with us at this holiday season. We invite the truly bored to visit our website at
http://family.pomosa.com/ and learn all sorts of embarrassing things about us.
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Really.
When I taught at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in 2000-01, we were required to register as permanent residents using a Chinese name. I pulled out my old Korean name, which had corresponding Chinese characters, my wife already had a name based on Chinese characters, and we used my "Korean" family name with each of the kid's middle names to get their Chinese names.
I have been told by native Mandarin speakers that my name in Chinese sounds OK, which makes it a much better name in China than it is in Korea.
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