And then there are times like these...

when my heart feels like it's about to explode.
The rest of my body, my hands, my feet, my eyes, my lips...everything and anything that has any memory of that connection, all feel a bit numb.

Actually, my heart can't explode, although I rather it would.
It's just going to sink, deep below my consciousness, far far away from my grasp.

And then it's going to wander aimlessly in that dark nothingness...
until it can lift itself out of that wide abyss of loss.

I can't let go of what I fought for for so long,
despite how impractical and unreasonable and unrealistic it may be.
But now, I'm forced to, and my brain has to be rewired after all those painful connections have already been made.

So I resist. But in the end, my plan fails anyway and I start over on a blank sheet of paper.

The only thing scarier than an empty sheet of paper is the realization that you don't have any desire, or volition to put anything on it.

There is always some madness in love...but there is also always some reason in madness. Really? At least that's what Nietzche said.

I see the madness but where is the reason? Is it something we come to realize 10 years after the fact when it no longer matters? Someone explain why I only see the madness, and no reason.

Nietzche was wrong. There is always some madness in love...and we try to justify that undeniable madness with a weak argument called reason, but in the end, we realize we've fooled ourselves--again.

Love, unfortunately, does not serve for anything.

My Mother's Voice and the Power of Prayer

My mother called me out of the blue today. I was home, being lazy, as I felt I should be on a warm Sunday afternoon. I had just experienced one of my most excruciatingly tiring days yesterday, having hiked up about 3000 stairs after getting drunk till 2 am the night before. My face was pale all day long from lack of oxygen. I blame being anemic. It strikes you at the most inopportune times. Just like phone calls from mothers.

"Did you go to church today?" She asked me as soon as I picked up the phone.

"..." A sense of guilt came over me like an overwhelming realization. "I will later," I said.

Wrong answer. My mother started crying over the phone and asked me, while ensuing in me the biggest guilt trip ever, why I had stopped believing.

"I didn't stop believing mom. I just need some time to find out the truth for myself," I said, trying in vain to calm her down.

"Why can't you do that while going to church?" she asked.

"Because I don't like the churches here," I nearly yelled back. "They're so commercialized, and they always ask me to teach them English when I go. I don't feel like I'm in a Christian community." I thought I had made a pretty good argument to defend myself.

She didn't believe me. "You're just being lazy. You don't want to wake up early on Sunday morning, so you're making up these philosophical excuses," she said between her muffled sniffles.

I thought about her statement. I couldn't get myself to argue, mostly because part of the reason I hadn't been going to church was simply because I needed rest from my hectic week. It wasn't a good enough excuse to miss church, according to what they teach you at church. If you really love God, you would still be there even if it cost you an arm and a leg and your night's sleep. That's what my mother said, at least.

For the next two hours, she kept asking me why I had changed. "You were such a strong believer in high school and you were so convicted to do God's work," she said. She thought I had been corrupted, among other things, by men. Men had somehow changed my faith and my priorities. I thought about this possibility and ruled it out. If anything, men had probably strengthened my faith because of the realization that I could not rely on them for anything.

To tell you the truth, it was painful. I appreciated the sincerity with which she spoke to me and the genuine concern she had for my spiritual well-being. But it didn't touch me. It felt intrusive, and I repelled her words, unconsciously. I had been sitting on the hardwood floor for quite some time, and my back had begun to hurt. I was shifting from one uncomfortable position to another, hearing her talk, trying to evangelize to me. It was a new experience to be on the receiving side of the prosthelytization. I had always been the one doing it before. Words entered my ears but not my heart. I felt nothing, surprisingly, despite her tears.

And then she asked me, "Can we pray together?" My mother has always had the habit of praying with me over the phone, at the airport, in bed, at restaurants, at school, wherever she had the opportunity to do so. But we hadn't prayed together in a while. I kind of missed it. I agreed, and I closed my eyes and held the phone to my ear.

Strangely, for the first time in all of the two hours we were on the phone with each other, the words she was speaking made me cry. I don't know what it was. Maybe the memory of feeling secure when I prayed with her in the past, maybe the unbreakable strength in her sobbing voice, or maybe it was really the holy spirit. Something. But it was no longer the guilt trip that I dreaded, but rather a soothing reassurance that everything--despite the million uncertainties about the future--would be okay. And I felt like running to my mother across the 10 thousand mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean to tell her I loved her and thank her for her little reminders about the reasons why I exist today.

I still don't know how I feel about Korean churches, but I think I'll pray tonight. A prayer that seems so foreign to me after all these months of being silent. Maybe that's the first step to get me back on track.

Obituary to Former President Roh Moo-hyun

The 16th president of South Korea ended his own life today in the peaceful mountainside near his retirement home. He took with him the burden of a humiliating prosecution that stamped a man who fought his whole life for democracy and justice with a $6 million dollar corruption scandal. "You should now discard me," he wrote in a 14-line note, his last remaining message to the world. "I no longer stand for the values you pursue."

Former President Roh Moo-hyun, a human rights lawyer who was swept into office in 2002 on the wave of change and hope, was far from a conniving politician. He had a mind of his own, and frequently turned the floors upside down by challenging the traditional hierarchy of Korean politics. His opponents called him ignorant and reckless. His supporters, which continued to dwindle in size after fits of labor unrest, economic downturn and diplomatic friction, called him brave and revolutionary. Ultimately, he was a man with bigger dreams than his politics could handle.

Roh was born in the rural outskirts of Kimhae near Korea's second largest city of Busan a year after Korea was liberated from Japanese colonization. Even before becoming a politician, Roh knew the ins and outs of protesting against authority. In 1960, he led a student protest refusing to write a mandatory essay praising then president Syngman Rhee.

A self-made man who never attended university, Roh passed the bar in 1975 and practiced tax law until he personally saw the bruised and bloody bodies of tortured students. In a move that changed his life, he went from prosecuting tax offenders to defending students and labor activists from torture. In 1987, he participated directly in the pro-democracy movement that transformed the political nature of Korea. His fight against corruption, autocracy, and power was the example of the courage people wanted to see.

After being elected to a few insignificant regional political positions starting in 1988, Roh appeared from the shadows and won the December 2002 presidential elections by a narrow margin of 2%. His support base was a group of internet-savvy young people who called themselves Nosamo, or "Roh lovers group," and were hungry for political change.

As the underdog who knew seemed to know little about the complicated etiquette of politics, Roh came into office with ambitious plans of reforming everything from the tax system to the educational system to the location of the country's capital. As suspected, he pushed the wrong buttons on too many important people.

When change did not come as quickly as expected and the economy slumped from falling investment, Roh’s popularity also took a downward turn. His friendly policies toward North Korea were criticized as submissive appeasement and his decision to send troops to Iraq in contradiction to his distant attitude toward Washington flared up public controversy.

Then in March 2004, the opposition party impeached Roh on charges of unconstitutionally electioneering and governing incompetently. Though the constitutional court overturned the impeachment, Roh could not satisfy either his supporters or his critics with any of his subsequent policies. He ended his administration with several unfinished tasks, including the KORUS FTA and his unsuccessful housing reform plan.

But unlike other former presidents, Roh stayed in the public eye even after leaving office. He maintained a website and his quiet home in Bonghwa Village became a sort of tourist attraction for hundreds of curious bypassers a day. Despite the criticism regarding his policies, there were still many who revered the former president for upholding his values of progressivism, freedom of civil society, and welfare for the poor.

Then, in the midst of his transition to semi-normal life, Roh and his family members were accused of bribery involving $6 million dollars in payments from a businessman. After months of intense interrogation and public derailment, the former twinkle in the ex-president’s eyes turned into bloodshot fatigue.

“I apologize for disappointing the people,” he wrote, before taking his life.

In a society where a politician is expected to take moral responsibility for scandals involved with family members, Roh could not escape the guilt of tarnishing the sacred values he stood for. It did not matter that several other former presidents had also been involved in bribery scandals. He felt, with the most respect for Korean society, that he had not done his job as a civil servant. But his death leaves many with a disheartening question. If not him, who spoke out against corruption and power all his life, then who?

Roh Moo-hyun is survived by his wife, Kwon Yang-sook, his son, Roh Geon-ho, and his daughter, Roh Jeong-yon. May he rest in peace and the values he fought for be taken on by those left behind.

The Eloquent Sounds of Silence

By Pico Iyer
Time Magazine, originally published in 1993, republished 2001

Every one of us knows the sensation of going up, on retreat, to a high place and feeling ourselves so lifted up that we can hardly imagine the circumstances of our usual lives, or all the things that make us fret. In such a place, in such a state, we start to recite the standard litany: that silence is sunshine, where company is clouds; that silence is rapture, where company is doubt; that silence is golden, where company is brass.

But silence is not so easily won. And before we race off to go prospecting in those hills, we might usefully recall that fool's gold is much more common and that gold has to be panned for, dug out from other substances. "All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence," wrote Herman Melville, one of the loftiest and most eloquent of souls. Working himself up to an ever more thunderous cry of affirmation, he went on, "Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is the only Voice of our God.'' For Melville, though, silence finally meant darkness and hopelessness and self-annihilation. Devastated by the silence that greeted his heartfelt novels, he retired into a public silence from which he did not emerge for more than 30 years. Then, just before his death, he came forth with his final utterance -- the luminous tale of Billy Budd -- and showed that silence is only as worthy as what we can bring back from it.

We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.

Or simply breathe. For silence is responsiveness, and in silence we can listen to something behind the clamor of the world. "A man who loves God, necessarily loves silence,'' wrote Thomas Merton, who was, as a Trappist, a connoisseur, a caretaker of silences. It is no coincidence that places of worship are places of silence: if idleness is the devil's playground, silence may be the angels'. It is no surprise that silence is an anagram of license. And it is only right that Quakers all but worship silence, for it is the place where everyone finds his God, however he may express it. Silence is an ecumenical state, beyond the doctrines and divisions created by the mind. If everyone has a spiritual story to tell of his life, everyone has a spiritual silence to preserve.

So it is that we might almost say silence is the tribute we pay to holiness; we slip off words when we enter a sacred space, just as we slip off shoes. A "moment of silence'' is the highest honor we can pay someone; it is the point at which the mind stops and something else takes over (words run out when feelings rush in). A "vow of silence'' is for holy men the highest devotional act. We hold our breath, we hold our words; we suspend our chattering selves and let ourselves "fall silent,'' and fall into the highest place of all.

It often seems that the world is getting noisier these days: in Japan, which may be a model of our future, cars and buses have voices, doors and elevators speak. The answering machine talks to us, and for us, somewhere above the din of the TV; the Walkman preserves a public silence but ensures that we need never -- in the bathtub, on a mountaintop, even at our desks -- be without the clangor of the world. White noise becomes the aural equivalent of the clash of images, the nonstop blast of fragments that increasingly agitates our minds. As Ben Okri, the young Nigerian novelist, puts it, "When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.''

There is, of course, a place for noise, as there is for daily lives. There is a place for roaring, for the shouting exultation of a baseball game, for hymns and spoken prayers, for orchestras and cries of pleasure. Silence, like all the best things, is best appreciated in its absence: if noise is the signature tune of the world, silence is the music of the other world, the closest thing we know to the harmony of the spheres. But the greatest charm of noise is when it ceases. In silence, suddenly, it seems as if all the windows of the world are thrown open and everything is as clear as on a morning after rain. Silence, ideally, hums. It charges the air. In Tibet, where the silence has a tragic cause, it is still quickened by the fluttering of prayer flags, the tolling of temple bells, the roar of wind across the plains, the memory of chant.

Silence, then, could be said to be the ultimate province of trust: it is the place where we trust ourselves to be alone; where we trust others to understand the things we do not say; where we trust a higher harmony to assert itself. We all know how treacherous are words, and how often we use them to paper over embarrassment, or emptiness, or fear of the larger spaces that silence brings. "Words, words, words'' commit us to positions we do not really hold, the imperatives of chatter; words are what we use for lies, false promises and gossip. We babble with strangers; with intimates we can be silent. We "make conversation'' when we are at a loss; we unmake it when we are alone, or with those so close to us that we can afford to be alone with them.

In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.

Violence a Tragedy for Asian-Americans

Published in The Korea Times
By Sang-Woo Arnold Oh

"Jiverly Voong, an unusual name," commented an MSNBC anchor reporting the news. "Let me spell it for you: J-i-v-e-r-l-y V-o-o-n-g; Jiverly Voong," the anchor repeated.

"It is a name as incomprehensible as his act of killing 13 immigrants who were studying for a citizenship test at the American Civic Center, a local civic center that helps immigrants transition into the American culture."

At 10 a.m. on April 3, Voong, also known as Wong, backed up his borrowed car to block the back door to prevent escape. Clad in a bulletproof vest and armed with two pistols, Wong went on a shooting spree that left 14 people dead, including himself.

On April 7, a 69-year-old Korean man shot four people in a Korean Catholic retreat site in California. Both of these acts echo the massacre at Virginia Tech by Cho Seung-hee, a Korean-American student who killed 32 other students in Blacksburg, Va.

Such violent acts drive us to find an answer to the question of why? What is the motivation for such homicidal violence? As a Korean-American committed to Asian-American issues, Wong's story drove me to search the Internet endlessly to find answers.

What I found was disheartening. As was with the media coverage of the Virginia Tech Massacre, the discussion of the recent shootings has been restricted to only two themes: mental-health and gun-control.

Undoubtedly, these are important social issues. But to look for the reason behind the Binghamton tragedy within one of these two categories is to miss out, yet again, on an opportunity to address the deeper issue beneath the surface: the violence and the failure of assimilation of Asian immigrants into American society.

Our inability to imagine any alternative motive is perhaps because American culture is only trained to see Asians through the lens of the ``perfect minority." Wong and Cho's fundamental refusal to live inside that stereotype has left us with an interpretive paralysis.

Assimilation of Asian immigrants into American culture happens between two stereotypes: "model minority" and "perpetual foreigner."

The model minority stereotype, a seemingly harmless compliment, is simultaneously a racial refusal ― one that creates a false sense of acceptance and rejection at the same time. Thus the term, "perpetual foreigner."

These stereotypes prevent society from accepting Asians on their own terms. Instead, they can only be understood through America's distorted cultural representations.

This false translation renders Asians politically silent and socially invisible. The deep wound of silent invisibility now finds articulation in the only way we know how to be heard: violence.

It is a loud existential shout, a final attempt at becoming visible, being heard. These violent words are now being echoed in every nightly news bulletin, major newspapers and the countless feedback loop of the Internet media.

Our search for the shooters' motives should lead us to revisit our habits of cultural assimilation. It is time for us as a nation to explore the consequences of categorizing Asian-Americans as the "perfect minority" and see the social, political, racial and religious architecture of Asian-American subjectivity as a clue to the recent violence.

Or else the violent finale of Wong's massacre will again be as incomprehensible and foreign as his name.

I'm tired

And frustrated.

Just want to give ...

Up.

지금까지 잘 버텨왔는데 왜 이제와서 이러지?

Finding ways to distract myself

Every time I have to write a paper for class, I make up every excuse NOT to concentrate on it. I feel a sudden urge to clean my entire room, which usually stays untouched and pretty messy on a normal basis, and when that's not enough, I start organizing my roommate's stuff on the other side of the room. Then I start cleaning the kitchen, the living room, sweeping the floor, doing the dishes, even scrubbing the bathroom floors. Anything is better than having to sit in front of this computer and type out a paper. Anything.

I have a tendency to start making lists of things I have to do when I don't really want to do them. So I start with the current time (which right now is 5:21 pm) and plan out my the rest of my day exactly, detailing every thought I must think and action I must take to get something done by the time I go to sleep. For instance:
5:21-5:40 Write in blog about not being able to write my paper
5:40-5:45 Browse the internet to take a break
5:45-6:15 Read paper on North Korean economy by Hong Sung Kook and summarize
6:15-7:00 Write first page of paper
7:00-8:00 Dinner (yay!)
8:00-9:00 Read more papers on North Korean economy by other authors
9:00-11:00 Write page 2-4 of paper
11:00-11:30 Wash up and go to sleep

It's not that I'm OCD. I just like to imagine what I would most ideally be doing at certain times of the day. The funny thing is, once I finish writing the list, I rarely ever look at it again. Thus my conclusion that I'm the most impractical, inefficient person in the world. I just need some sort of therapy to convince myself that I'm being effective.

Even after I manage to sit myself down in front of the computer and open up Office, I continue to fidget. I start browsing the internet, "looking for references and sources" for my paper. Facebook is the devil. That's why I deactivated it. But just a couple of minutes ago, I forgot I had deactivated it and logged on. As easily as 1-2-3. They make it too easy to come back. It's an addiction I can't overcome.

I'm going crazy. I need to finish this paper but my mind is filled with everything BUT that wretched paper. Is there any way to cure myself?