The thermostat in Korean heaven is set at the same temperature as in my personal hell, a fact that has uncomfortably come to light over the past two weeks as fall begins to lose its grip to winter. I have copious amounts of evidence to prove my incompatibility with Korea's love for all spaces warm. But before I get to my hard evidence let's first taxonomize the levels of inferno, kind of like a scale of wing sauce temperatures.
No Warm
This level is called No Warm because it's not cool, and it's also not warm: it's nothing. This temperature does not really exist because it usually fails to be noticed at all. On a degree scale, it's probably close to 70 degrees, or whatever 'room temperature' implies. You can leave cheese and butter out in No Warm without fear. You can really do anything you want in no warm, and you can wear your most comfortable clothes in this temperature. It is No Warm.
Warm
When you put a palm on someone's forehead checking for a fever, you're really checking for Warm. You can't really say a forehead is ever hot, not in the sense that it would burn the person touching it. A warm forehead probably isn't a good sign, but in most other cases Warm is a nice descriptor. A warm personality. A warm smile. A warm relationship. Aside from global warming and foreheads, warm almost always has a positive connotation.
When I lived in Nepal I often waited till mid-afternoon to take a shower, once the water in the rooftop tank had a bit of time to warm. A 7am shower was too cold, and sometimes ended with my hair freezing into mini icicles.
Goldilocks liked her porridge warm for a reason. Because warm doesn't burn your mouth or give you brain freeze.
Grandpa Warm
There is warm, then there is Grandpa Warm, which is the temperature that my Grandpa Guilfoyle liked to keep his room over at the assisted-living facility where he lived. The only way to describe Grandpa Warm is to ask you to imagine being wrapped in an electric sleeping blanket, but this sleeping blanket is no ordinary blanket; it's made of air. So it's all around you, and it has no zipper. Grandpa Warm is great if you, for example, had been out walking on a cold day, in Russia, or you had just gone skiing, and the chairlift had suspended you in midair for an entire sunless morning. Grandpa Warm can resuscitate any limbs in danger of frostbite. In summary, though Grandpa Warm greets you with a hug you might get from a longtime friend, it doesn't stop hugging you and only reluctantly lets you go.
Korean Warm
Korean Warm can only be understood through an anecdote. Outside it's an overcast day and the temperature is in the mid-fifties, right on the border between Cool and No Warm. I could sleep outdoors in this weather. I could play or watch almost any sport at this temperature; it's dry and comfortable. Nara and I are boarding a bus bound for the east coast of Korea. We've walked up a few flights of stairs from the subway platform, and we're carrying a few bags, not heavy ones but sizable enough that you wouldn't want to lug them around a city as big as Seoul. I'm wearing jeans and a fleece jacket with a t-shirt underneath, but once I'm on the bus I know I've stepped into Grandpa Warm. The fleece is too much, and it has to come off. At first I think this to be the result of carrying bags around and walking up a few flights of stairs, but even after jettisoning the fleece the warmth persists, pushing the outer reaches of Grandpa Warm.
In the five minutes we sit and wait for the bus to depart, passengers fill up the empty seats. Each new passenger brings another degree of human warmth onto the bus; the windows begin to steam. Even when the full lengths of the windows are saturated with steam, no one takes their jacket off, and I notice a few women who are still wearing scarves or winter hats. Meanwhile, the anaconda of Grandpa Warm is tightening its grip around me. The bus roars into motion, and we're off.
Thirty minutes into the ride and I have already complained to Nara seven times about the heat. She sympathized with the first few complaints but now she's getting annoyed. "You should understand Koreans," she says, "They like warm places." I threaten to take my shirt off if the bus driver doesn't turn down the heat. I press against the window, looking for a latch, some portal to the cool world beyond the window. We are riding in a sauna on wheels, and someone just keeps pouring water onto the hot rocks in the bus's engine.
But this is not yet Korean Warm.
Engulfed in hot human steam, I make an unexpected discovery. Just as I'm about to register my eighth heat-related complaint with the only person who will listen to me, I reach my hand up to the vents and realize that there is, in fact, no air coming out; the heat was not even on. Minutes later, the vents rattle to life. A strong blast of furnace-grade air washes over me, over all, and I can see the Koreans bathing in it as I burn. This must be it, I think, this must be what they call Korean Warm: I have cast layers aside, absorbed the oppression of Grandpa Warm, and pressed my face up against a fogged window. There is no means of escape. But when the bus reaches our destination and we make our into the Sol Beach resort -- yes, quite fittingly our hotel was named Sol as in Sun, as in Hotter Than The Sun Hotel -- I realize that while on the bus we were only being driven to the gas chamber. We had yet to experience Korean Warm.
But when we enter room 412 at Sol Beach Resort, only then do I know what Korean Warm is. It is quite simply this: walking up to a thermostat in a hotel room and seeing that it has been set to 30 degrees celsius. This is, and I had to look it up, 86 degrees fahrenheit. This is the temperature that they want you to feel when you first walk into the room, the temperature that is supposed to make you go 'ahhh.' And I have no doubt that for 95% of the clientele, 86 degrees is heavenly. But for me, 86 degrees should be reserved for the beach in July, or the ballpark in August, not for constant room temperature when it's 60 degrees outside.
The definition of Korean Warm also comes with a qualifier; it only qualifies as Korean Warm if there is no way to change the temperature; in other words you must be trapped. The thermostat at the Hot Flames Hotel, of course, could not be altered, no matter how many times I pushed the down button. And I pushed it many, many times. My only option, then, was to open the sliding door to the balcony to let gale force winds into the room; these winds, also appalled by the temperature in the room, tried to escape via the crack in the front door, creating a high-pitched whistling noise that I think must have been the sounds of tiny molecules of cool air dissipating in our room's inferno.
None of this should have been a big surprise to me. I should've remember my Korean friend Jay, who once tried to bake me alive at a Days Inn near Niagara Falls, and who later had a Thermostat Battle Royale with Navin, our Nepali guest whose preferred temperature is somewhere between Cave and I-Can-See-My-Breath-Inside. I should've known from living in Korea for more than two years. So what was it? Maybe in my four months back in the U.S. I had acclimitized too well; maybe I'd gotten used to spending time in rooms in which you're not worried about singeing your arm hairs just by leaning up against a wall.
Whatever the case, it's sad to know that even if I get into heaven I won't be able to see my Korean friends there; no, they'll be a few floors below me, kicking their feet up on a steamy bus or reclining atop a scalding floor of hot coals, all while wearing their snuggest wool jackets.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Prelude to an Engagement
Everyone likes to hear the story of how two people got engaged. This is not that story. This is a slightly shorter and less thrilling story about the days and hours before I got engaged, but in some ways this story is just as important because the story ends with an engagement therefore everything leading up to it is part of that story. It's like the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or something like that.
Getting engaged is cause de etra celebratione, in any nation. Or so I thought until I found myself sound asleep within a half an hour of getting engaged here in Korea. I could blame jet-lag, but I think the post-popping-of-the-question deep sleep was more the result of decision-lag: you spend so much time thinking about making a big decision -- getting married, moving abroad, buying a new house -- that when the actual moment arrives it sets you free in a way that you did not expect. The celebration is in the open landscape of a future; the clouds have cleared and your plane can take off. Why rush right into the future; there's plenty of time for a short nap.
An engagement in Korea is set in motion by the marrying couple but only becomes official when the two sets of parents sit down to decide how to carve up the marital turkey. Once the date is set, the couple can announce their plans publicly, in other words they can make those precious calls and tell the story of their engagement: "Our parents met, and they said April 12th was fine." Hooray! Nara says that because the meeting of the parents takes precedent over everything else, Korean men often will not even technically propose in the sense that they may never utter the words "Will you marry me?" Sometimes the woman will make light of this at the wedding, refusing to say 'I do' till her husband-to-be asks her to marry him first. I think this has to be a point in favor of gender equality, and should be studied further by feminists.
So even though I apparently didn't have to propose, since it was going to be impossible to set up a parental summit I decided to take matters into my own hands. On the flight from Chicago to Seoul via Tokyo, I found myself occasionally digging my hand into the bag carrying the ring, which was also transporting a bag of Chex Mix, Cool Ranch Doritos, and an already half-eaten bag of Sour Patch Kids. These snacks plus the ring were my four most valuable possessions, ones that I could not risk stowing in my checked luggage. When I began to fill out the customs card, I wondered whether I needed to declare the ring (since it's so valuable and precious and especially expensive). But that immediately seemed like a stupid presumption. Any woman could wear a ring on her finger and wouldn't be required to declare it at customs much less to take it off of her finger in the security gates.
I also felt compelled to tell someone about the purpose of my trip. I did not feel like a regular passenger, and thought maybe I should try to get an upgrade to business class or economy plus at the very least. Instead I was seated next to a large man wearing safari clothing. When I sat down I immediately felt a rush of hot air sweep into my nostrils; it was as if I'd opened the morning hot-breath oven and inside the oven last night's dinner was still roasting. The flight from Chicago to Tokyo is 13 hours, and suddenly those 13 hours seemed a lot longer and quite a bit hotter. No, this guy would not be the person I'd select to share my news. Fortunately the row of three seats in front of me only had one passenger in the window, a young Asian woman, and I seized the opportunity to gain a little more breathing room.
A moment after I was settled in my new seat, I felt a poke on my right shoulder coming from the finger of the hot-breath man behind me. "Was it something I said?" he asked with a smile on his face. Disarmed by his friendliness, I grasped for the right humorous excuse, one about me having long legs or being a loud snorer. He seemed to accept, and surely he didn't mind the extra room himself. The Asian woman sitting next to me turned out to be from Thailand. She was heading home to visit her family while her American husband sorted out their next destination; they had both graduated from business school and were deciding whether to look for work in the US or relocate to Asia, maybe to Singapore where he had a job offer with Price Waterhouse.
She seemed like the perfect person to tell about the ring in my bag. After we'd talked long enough to be embarrassed that we hadn't properly introduced ourselves, she told me her name in what I know to be standard Thai-to-westerner fashion: first you tell a westerner your real name - the one with 30 syllables - then, after the foreigner's eyes grow wide, you shorten those 30 syllables down to one easy-to-remember syllable. I made her write down her given name (she is, after all, part of an important story): Pastraporn Rittikosi Nichols. The Nichols part I could handle, and probably could've just called her Nichols if it were socially appropriate. Fortunately she did read the 'Try Again' message in my eyes and quickly shortened her name to Pap. This I would not forget.
Pap became my trans-Pacific confidante. Though she really had no choice but to listen unless she pulled a swim move to extricate herself from the window seat, she listened to the story of how I ended up on a flight back to Asia to make one of life's biggest decisions. Sometimes it's just easier to tell a story like this to a total stranger, maybe because the story takes on a fresh, untold quality ripe with opportunities for enhancement and embellishment. There were no such embellishments in my story to Pap, except for a fudging of a few details -- like me not having a job, a detail which, though the subject of a story in itself, would break up the flow of the romantic tale I was weaving for Pap. It helped that Pap had a similar story of her known. She had met her husband while in the U.S. as a student, and in some ways her story was mine, only in a different setting. As in my relationship, the origin and development of her international relationship was all about timing. Had she decided to study in Bangkok or New York instead of Boston, had she majored in finance instead of economics, had she deferred her enrollment as she thought she might once, she would not have met the man who would become her husband.
Timing also shaped the arc of her relationship, how fast it could progress, and what could be shared with others. She and her husband, for example, had lived together prior to getting engaged for nearly six months, which she decided was a fact best kept from her mother and father in southern Thailand. For the sake of everyone involved, it may be true that the cultural onion can only be peeled back one layer at a time. I had to learn this in my relationship, too, pacing the meetings I would have with Nara's family, putting the brakes on plans we made in the first month of dating.
To Pap, my story was a page-turner mostly because she understood it from every angle. As a woman, she could identify with Nara's feelings of apprehension and anticipation; as an Asian woman, she knew the dynamics of a communal culture and the norms which guide a family's opening up to any outsider; as the wife of an American man, she heard in my story the same struggle to find that geographic and cultural middle place from which to start a new cultural thread.
Because she understood me so well, I offered her a few of my Sour Patch Kids. She declined, pointing to a toothache. But I sensed that she appreciated the offer; the Sour Patch Kids were, after all, my second or third most valuable possession.
In Tokyo, Pap and I searched the departure information screen for our next flights. Her flight to Bangkok sent her to the right while my Seoul-bound flight catapulted me to the left. She thanked me for being a good seatmate and I thanked her for listening. I found gate B18 and waited to board my flight to Seoul, where Nara awaited my arrival. It was up to me from here on out.
Getting engaged is cause de etra celebratione, in any nation. Or so I thought until I found myself sound asleep within a half an hour of getting engaged here in Korea. I could blame jet-lag, but I think the post-popping-of-the-question deep sleep was more the result of decision-lag: you spend so much time thinking about making a big decision -- getting married, moving abroad, buying a new house -- that when the actual moment arrives it sets you free in a way that you did not expect. The celebration is in the open landscape of a future; the clouds have cleared and your plane can take off. Why rush right into the future; there's plenty of time for a short nap.
An engagement in Korea is set in motion by the marrying couple but only becomes official when the two sets of parents sit down to decide how to carve up the marital turkey. Once the date is set, the couple can announce their plans publicly, in other words they can make those precious calls and tell the story of their engagement: "Our parents met, and they said April 12th was fine." Hooray! Nara says that because the meeting of the parents takes precedent over everything else, Korean men often will not even technically propose in the sense that they may never utter the words "Will you marry me?" Sometimes the woman will make light of this at the wedding, refusing to say 'I do' till her husband-to-be asks her to marry him first. I think this has to be a point in favor of gender equality, and should be studied further by feminists.
So even though I apparently didn't have to propose, since it was going to be impossible to set up a parental summit I decided to take matters into my own hands. On the flight from Chicago to Seoul via Tokyo, I found myself occasionally digging my hand into the bag carrying the ring, which was also transporting a bag of Chex Mix, Cool Ranch Doritos, and an already half-eaten bag of Sour Patch Kids. These snacks plus the ring were my four most valuable possessions, ones that I could not risk stowing in my checked luggage. When I began to fill out the customs card, I wondered whether I needed to declare the ring (since it's so valuable and precious and especially expensive). But that immediately seemed like a stupid presumption. Any woman could wear a ring on her finger and wouldn't be required to declare it at customs much less to take it off of her finger in the security gates.
I also felt compelled to tell someone about the purpose of my trip. I did not feel like a regular passenger, and thought maybe I should try to get an upgrade to business class or economy plus at the very least. Instead I was seated next to a large man wearing safari clothing. When I sat down I immediately felt a rush of hot air sweep into my nostrils; it was as if I'd opened the morning hot-breath oven and inside the oven last night's dinner was still roasting. The flight from Chicago to Tokyo is 13 hours, and suddenly those 13 hours seemed a lot longer and quite a bit hotter. No, this guy would not be the person I'd select to share my news. Fortunately the row of three seats in front of me only had one passenger in the window, a young Asian woman, and I seized the opportunity to gain a little more breathing room.
A moment after I was settled in my new seat, I felt a poke on my right shoulder coming from the finger of the hot-breath man behind me. "Was it something I said?" he asked with a smile on his face. Disarmed by his friendliness, I grasped for the right humorous excuse, one about me having long legs or being a loud snorer. He seemed to accept, and surely he didn't mind the extra room himself. The Asian woman sitting next to me turned out to be from Thailand. She was heading home to visit her family while her American husband sorted out their next destination; they had both graduated from business school and were deciding whether to look for work in the US or relocate to Asia, maybe to Singapore where he had a job offer with Price Waterhouse.
She seemed like the perfect person to tell about the ring in my bag. After we'd talked long enough to be embarrassed that we hadn't properly introduced ourselves, she told me her name in what I know to be standard Thai-to-westerner fashion: first you tell a westerner your real name - the one with 30 syllables - then, after the foreigner's eyes grow wide, you shorten those 30 syllables down to one easy-to-remember syllable. I made her write down her given name (she is, after all, part of an important story): Pastraporn Rittikosi Nichols. The Nichols part I could handle, and probably could've just called her Nichols if it were socially appropriate. Fortunately she did read the 'Try Again' message in my eyes and quickly shortened her name to Pap. This I would not forget.
Pap became my trans-Pacific confidante. Though she really had no choice but to listen unless she pulled a swim move to extricate herself from the window seat, she listened to the story of how I ended up on a flight back to Asia to make one of life's biggest decisions. Sometimes it's just easier to tell a story like this to a total stranger, maybe because the story takes on a fresh, untold quality ripe with opportunities for enhancement and embellishment. There were no such embellishments in my story to Pap, except for a fudging of a few details -- like me not having a job, a detail which, though the subject of a story in itself, would break up the flow of the romantic tale I was weaving for Pap. It helped that Pap had a similar story of her known. She had met her husband while in the U.S. as a student, and in some ways her story was mine, only in a different setting. As in my relationship, the origin and development of her international relationship was all about timing. Had she decided to study in Bangkok or New York instead of Boston, had she majored in finance instead of economics, had she deferred her enrollment as she thought she might once, she would not have met the man who would become her husband.
Timing also shaped the arc of her relationship, how fast it could progress, and what could be shared with others. She and her husband, for example, had lived together prior to getting engaged for nearly six months, which she decided was a fact best kept from her mother and father in southern Thailand. For the sake of everyone involved, it may be true that the cultural onion can only be peeled back one layer at a time. I had to learn this in my relationship, too, pacing the meetings I would have with Nara's family, putting the brakes on plans we made in the first month of dating.
To Pap, my story was a page-turner mostly because she understood it from every angle. As a woman, she could identify with Nara's feelings of apprehension and anticipation; as an Asian woman, she knew the dynamics of a communal culture and the norms which guide a family's opening up to any outsider; as the wife of an American man, she heard in my story the same struggle to find that geographic and cultural middle place from which to start a new cultural thread.
Because she understood me so well, I offered her a few of my Sour Patch Kids. She declined, pointing to a toothache. But I sensed that she appreciated the offer; the Sour Patch Kids were, after all, my second or third most valuable possession.
In Tokyo, Pap and I searched the departure information screen for our next flights. Her flight to Bangkok sent her to the right while my Seoul-bound flight catapulted me to the left. She thanked me for being a good seatmate and I thanked her for listening. I found gate B18 and waited to board my flight to Seoul, where Nara awaited my arrival. It was up to me from here on out.
I found the right place
And I found the right person
THE END
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