Maintenance: I realize that you can only scroll down a fifth of the page or so, but I don't know what the problem is. Working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Last night I had itchy remote control syndrome, and switched back and forth between a Korean film on TV called My Wife is a Gangster (more literal translation: Organized Crime Spouse) and a Korean-dubbed Lord of the Rings. (The latter suffered greatly from the dubbing, by the way.)

Lord of the Rings reminded me afresh of an interesting linguistic characteristic of Korean -- the expression of "yes" and "no." Several weeks ago, I waxed rhapsodic about the Yoko Ono exhibit showing here, especially the piece where you could climb a ladder, take hold of a magnifying glass attached on a string to the ceiling, and decipher the small word etched on a square piece of glass also hung from the ceiling. The word was "YES," and the piece moved me with its quietly confident affirmation. We search the sky for meaning, raising our faces to the heavens to cry out, "Are you there? Is there a point?" and Ono's piece assures us, "Yes. I am. There is."

I went to see this exhibit with a Korean friend, and explained, excitedly, why I loved this piece. She absorbed my explanation, paused thoughtfully, and commented, "You know, the word 'yes' in Korean doesn't really carry that kind of affirmation. It's more an expression of acknowledgement and obedience." So what expression would a Korean have used in the artwork? We wondered about that for a minute and came up with goeh reh, which means approximately, "That's right."

LotR reminded me of this because of the Korean translation of "no." When Gandalf, just having defeated Balrog, falls into the depths of the mines of Moria, Elijah Wood screams "Noooo!" before being carried away by Sean Bean (hobbits put up with a lot of picking up and carrying around in the movie -- the curse of being short and cute). In Korean, if you're asked a question to which the answer is no, you say, ah-nee yo. But this is used pretty much exclusively as a response to a query. The equivalent to Frodo's anguished "no" in Korean is ahn dwei, which translates literally to "no do," or more poetically, "It cannot be."
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Today I woke up early (6 am), despite having been up til 1 am watching the gangster wife kick ass and Viggo Mortensen shed manly tears over Sean Bean's death, in order to go to temple and pay respects to my paternal grandfather. It was cool and slightly humid, and the temple doors were open, letting in a bit of a breeze just where I was sitting. My dad and I had just done the bowing and offering of water, and were sitting cross-legged on red square cushions, listening to the monk chanting and ringing a bell. I was on the verge of complaining that I was cold, when I decided to just deal -- after all, we were headed out shortly, and it really wasn't all that cold. Accept the cold and just chill, I told myself, and I felt a sudden calm wash over me.

A couple month ago, at my uncle's funeral, my cousin Jung-eun and I talked about going to church and temple. Both of us had been to church with my oldest uncle, who became Christian because of his wife's influence, and whose kids are married to a pastor-in-training and about to enter a seminary, respectively. "But you know," my cousin said, "I always feel comfortable and a sense of peace in a temple, and I never felt that at church." I thought of that again this morning, when I sat in the cool breeze and accepted that I was cold and felt... I don't know. Refreshed. Who knows, maybe it was my grandfather, sending me a little peace from beyond.