I love my children. I am just very grateful for the local public school system.

All three kids are off to school (though Elias shed a few tears today, causing a few other moms to cry for him), and we are trying to get into a new rhythm. The boys and I walk to the elementary school, and Bethany rides off on her bike to the middle school. Depending on the morning, Peter joins us or waves as he drives off.

And when we’re lucky, everyone has remembered their backpacks, homework, and lunch boxes.

The novelty of the school lunch wore off fairly quickly, so we’ve had to get creative. What will they joyfully eat in the 20 minutes (!) they get for lunch? Bethany and Corban got smart. They asked for leftovers in a Thermos. Every now and then the leftovers are recognizable to friends – meatloaf, mac & cheese, spaghetti. But more often than not, leftovers involve sticky white rice and some sort of marinated meat or fish. Even better are the fragrant soups full of oxtails, seaweed or radishes.

Having been the brunt of much teasing and ridicule during my childhood (we were the 1st Asian American family to move into our suburban school district), I must admit that I worry a bit that bringing seaweed soup would create some social difficulties for my children. One might argue (and believe me I have tried) that cheese has a pretty pungent smell. But kids know cheese. They even get processed cheese food in a can. But seaweed?

Why God why? Maybe it’s the four weeks of seaweed soup I ate post-partum with each of my children to help my recovery and breastmilk production (thanks, Mom!) that they love it so. Maybe they like the shades of green and the opacity of the broth against the glimmer of the Thermos.

The first few times Bethany or Corban take something “new” for lunch I try to be cool. I don’t ask them whether or not their friends wanted to know what was in their lunch. I don’t ask them if anyone commented on the odors released when said Thermos is opened. I just closely monitor the contents of the Thermos when I do the dishes.

I was genuinely surprised when the Thermoses would come home empty. Maybe some rice (sorry, Mom) stuck to the bottom, but pretty close to empty.

I guess the thing that I feared most – that their friends would make fun of them and their food choices – doesn’t matter to them because it hasn’t turned out that way? I know friends have asked, and made a comment here and there. Maybe Bethany and Corban are so hungry that rice and seaweed soup is better than cardboard pizza with fruit cocktail cups? Maybe they don’t care what other people think? Maybe they are more comfortable in their own skin than I give them credit for?

Having children forces me to deal with my stuff, the old stuff from years ago that has spilled into my 30s. Their worldview and understanding of being Asian American forces me to deal with my understanding of Asian American so that I don’t freeze myself in time much like my parents’ generation did.

Next time: Thoughts on the “Guess whose baby picture this is” game.

When you get caught doing something wrong, really, really, hurt other people wrong, what do you do? How do you respond, and how do you feel about yourself?

Here in America a car salesman gets caught sending flowers to his girlfriend because the florist sends the bill to the house…where the salesman’s wife sees the receipt. His reaction? He sues.
http://allday.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/08/13/314223.aspx

In China, the head of a Chinese manufacturer linked to the lead-tainted Sesame Street toys kills himself.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/08/13/china.toymaker.ap/

Again, I know that these are extreme examples that are complicated, but I think it was my own reaction that was rather unsettling.

When I heard about the company CEO’s suicide, I could understand it. I wouldn’t follow in his footsteps, but I could see how his train of thought might have gone.

It’s not just guilt. It’s not just the financial hit. It’s the shame. My cousin, “Denise”, and “Chris” – they all felt the shame and couldn’t silence the demons.

When I heard about the salesman suing the florist, I couldn’t understand it at all.

Is there something redeeming or worth redeeming in such shame? Is there something redeeming or worth redeeming in personal rights and entitlement?

Lord have mercy on us all.

Are you what you read? Or better yet, does the book you’re reading say something about you?

I realized I must have looked rather unfriendly, or at the very least a bit too serious to be sitting at the pool smelling of sunscreen, with this summer’s collection of titles: Yellow, Living on the Boundaries, Divorce and Remarriage in the Church, Crucial Confrontations, The Opposite of Fate, The Woman Warrior and Grace Eventually.

Now some of you are wondering how in the world I had time to read as much as I did. Well, I read at night and in the afternoon I get to read at the pool.

Now some of you are wondering why at the pool. Thanks to my frugal parents, I hate running the a/c during the peak hours of 12-4, which means I feed the kids lunch and we head out to the pool so I can maximize the benefits of having an annual pool pass. (It really is cheaper than running the a/c.) I get there early, grab a seat under the big umbrella, and because my kids are older it’s safe to watch them from the concrete pool deck as they spend vast amounts of time submurged in chlorinated water.

I’ve made a few very unscientific observations:
Most days I’m the only “yellow” person around. Tans not included.
People are more likely to talk to me when I am not holding a bright yellow book titled “YELLOW”, even if I am reading the book with a smile.
People are most likely to talk to me when I am struggling to keep the sunscreen from ruining my copy of Real Simple or People magazine.
My books are too serious for the pool.

Well, the pool season is almost over, but I still have a few good weeks of reading left.

Any recommendations? What are you all reading? What does the book say about you?

What would you do if someone in authority told you couldn’t do what you knew to be the right thing? Is it better to obey the authority or disobey the authority and do the right thing?

My daughter considered the options and opted for the latter.

She’s grown up with computers, cellphones and recycling. The first two have become necessary evils in my world, but recycling has become a practical way for the entire family to care for creation. We started composting last year and recycle everything we can. The schools have recycling bins, and encourage the staff and students to recycle as well.

But when there are special lunch days (when you can order a sub sandwich from a local shop), you are not allowed to carry anything out of the lunchroom unless it’s in their lunchbox (which they don’t have since they ordered their lunch for special lunch day). So on those days, hundreds of recyclable bottles get tossed away.

Except one bottle. Bethany said she asked the lunchroom monitor if she could carefully carry the bottle to the bathroom to dump it out to recycle in class. She was told she couldn’t even though she explained why she wanted to do what she wanted to do. She told me she thought about it and figured it was better to sneak the bottle out the lunchroom and recycle it.

We talked about her taking the issue up with her teachers and principal and finding ways to make special lunch days fun for the kids and better for the earth. We talked about how she felt unheard and dismissed by the lunch monitor. We talked about trying to honor God, and I told her how it’s exciting to hear how thoughtful she is about the day-to-day things (we’ll ignore the state of her room right now),

But was she right to sneak the bottle out of the room for the sake of going green? What rules have you broken in order to do what you thought was right?

So where is a girl to get a hip pair of glasses with nose pads?!

My daughter is beautiful – inside and out. She has these crazy dimples that look like we poked her with a pencil and this infectious giggle. She also has great hair that takes a day to dry.

And she was genetically doomed as both Peter and I are nearsighted. She finally failed the school eye exam so we went to get a full exam done having already predicted the end result – glasses.

She tried on half the store’s inventory, vogueing every step of the way, and finally picked these very fun pink plastic frames. After about 30 seconds she realized they weren’t going to work because they kept sliding down because the frames were designed with some other kind of face in mind.

Undeterred she finally found a cute black and red pair of glasses with nosepads – which after two hours of adjusting still don’t sit correctly on her face.

The eyeglass tech person seemed rather annoyed and tried to end things by saying, “Well, she doesn’t have much of a bridge now does she?”

Fortunately my filter worked because the thoughts didn’t come out of my mouth but simply hung in the air in the invisible thought bubble: “And your point is?”

So, Bethany likes the glasses (and thankfully her nose) but hates that they don’t actually fit well. We can’t be the only ones. What have you all done to keep myopia from cramping your style?

I am a resident alien. My port of entry was Seattle, and my family was headed to Philadelphia. Our visit with extended family and friends in Chicago lasted a lifetime. But, I am still not an American.

Initially it was because of a misunderstanding. My parents had mistakenly been told that their application for citizenship would automatically include their child. Instead of citizenship I was issued a green card (which actually isn’t green, FYI) and retained Korean citizenship.

But no one knew. Resident aliens aren’t green. Resident aliens don’t look a certain way, sound a certain way, act a certain way. However, I learned that Americans must look a certain way, sound a certain way because telling people over the years that I was from Chicago rarely sufficed.

Asian American sisters and brothers, you know what I’m talking about, right? It’s the “Where are you from” conversation that must include an explanation of where you, your parents, grandparents, etc. are from since “Name your all-American city, town, village” couldn’t possibly be the simple answer. Even though I had no recollection of being in Korea (I was 8 months old when I immigrated to the states), America couldn’t possibly be my home.

The lesson was reviewed after the VTech massacre. Seung-Hui Cho was identified as a resident alien, an immigrant. He was not American. In very few instances was he even Asian or Korean American. Korean government officials apologized and sent their condolences. Even though Cho had left Korea more than a decade before, he was still Korean. Even though Cho had lived longer in America than he had in Korea, it seemed that America wanted nothing to do with him, his isolation, his darkness.

Well, apparently Pat Buchanan wants others to believe that Cho and my Korean American brothers and sisters are part of an invasion. His op ed piece scares me, angers me, exhausts me:

“Almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien. Had this deranged young man who secretly hated us never come here, 32 people would heading home from Blacksburg for summer vacation.
What was Cho doing here? How did he get in?
Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation’s doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.
Cho was one of them.” Pat Buchanan, May 1, 2007

I am one of THEM. I am one of those 864,000 Koreans who have invaded this country.

Days after the shootings, I downloaded the INS application for naturalization. I began to fill it out, and I cried. I’ve waited years, hoping that South Korea and the US would offer dual citizenship because I am a daughter of both countries. My father strongly recommended I complete the application as soon as possible, but I couldn’t. Maybe in the days or weeks to come I will…

I’ve had lengthy conversations over the years about how our identity as Christ-followers should or should not be qualified by our ethnic or racial identities, how loving Jesus means it does or doesn’t matter that we are gendered beings. I am first a Christian, a Christ-follower, a sinner. I am a resident alien to this country and to this world.

But does it matter that I am a Korean American woman?

So, what does it mean when a man starts out by saying, “I cried like a 7-year-old girl with a skinned knee?” I’m really asking this. I’ve actually been asking this of many people ever since I saw a blog post start out with that line. I’ve been asking men and women, Asian American and not and my very unscientific poll shows women rolling their eyes and saying, “What?!” and men rolling their eyes and saying, “So what.” Again, very unscientific. There were a number of men who did respond by saying, “What?!” and they all either work with me or, at least in one case, is married to me.

Having had to parent both a 7-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy I can attest to the fact that both cry like mad when they skin their knees. The only difference is when the child (girl or boy) is told by the parent/authority figure to “stop crying”. Have you ever skinned your knee? I’ll never forget watching an acquaintance tell his son to “stop crying like a little girl”. I made a mental note that afternoon to pray for that young boy’s future wife.

It’s a little comment, which on my “good girl” days I can let it slide. But I’m growing weary of being a “good girl”. I love crying, connecting my soul and body to actually act out what it is feeling, experiencing. I want less to be “good” and want more to be “true” to the woman God intends me to be.

Now pass me a bandaid and some tissue, please.

For those of you who’ve read the book, there are a few references to the death of my mother-in-law. After she died, my husband and I opened up our home and invited my father-in-law to move in with us. Let’s just say I learned quite a bit about myself, about my father-in-law, about my husband, and about how you can take the man/woman out of Asia but you can’t take the Asian out of the man/woman.

To help all of us make the transition, we emptied out what had become our family’s favorite room – a room off to the side of the main floor that served as the previous owner’s home office. We moved in my FIL’s king size bed, a dresser, desk, bookcases, etc. to bring a touch of home and privacy.

Short of building a new master suite downstairs, it was the best we could do. And then we did the best we could do. I did the best I could do.

But at some point, the expectations (preparing separate Korean meals when the kids wanted spaghetti) and the realities (that I could barely get the spaghetti on the table, never mind the brown rice and kalbi-tang) collided. Peter and I realized that this was not a long-term solution.

Even my FIL felt the tension as he was used to being more the center of the family. Here in Libertyville the center of the family is always moving. One day it’s Bethany getting ready for her ballet classes. The next day it’s Corban and his lost lego piece.

My FIL has moved in with my sister-in-law. He tells people he would rather live in Chicago but he didn’t want to be a burden to me. Yes, I physically cringed when I first heard that.

But, Peter and I are trying to move beyond unhealthy guilt, balance it with love for my FIL, and live.

So the room that was once the “tv room” and then became “halabujee’s room” is becoming “my office”. Peter and I tore out the ugly blue carpet to find a hardwood floor that needed some love. Peter lovingly sanded, poly-stinky-stained it, painted the trim and then last night helped me with the first coat of Pepper Grass green, eggshell finish. It was the first time I spent more than a few seconds in that room since the end of last year when we moved the last of my FIL’s things out…

My office is now very green – vibrant, rich, full of hope and a little weird.