I'm back in Alaska! Flying in during the day was spectacular -- you can see the great tongues of ice flowing from the ice fields down into the Sound.

I wrote the following during my 24-hour journey from Seoul back to Anchorage.

THE ODYSSEY BACK TO ANCHORAGE AND A BLOW-BY-BLOW OF THE PAST WEEK
AUGUST 30
I smell like some Green Tea perfume I tried out in the duty free shop here. It’s one of those things I started doing during the two years I lived in Korea. It’s nice to smell good during a 10-hour flight. It makes me feel rich and luxurious somehow. Like I would actually own a $50 bottle of perfume by Chanel or Issey Miyake or J.Lo.

I’m no longer in the homeland, and I’m quite sad about that. Or rather, I was very sad until I touched down here in Osaka, and was on my own once again. I got up at 5:30 am to finish packing and have breakfast.

My great aunt cried a bit when the car drove away from the airport (she had to stay and wait for her brother, who was coming to the house later). She cried last year too.

I don’t remember if I cried or not last year. I probably did. I certainly did this time. When you go to your flight at Incheon airport, you have to go through opaque glass sliding doors that only open when someone approaches. Last year, my father and grandmother stood and waved at me every time another passenger went through those doors. This year, I got shunted into a short security line, and waved to them only once after I went through the doors. I think that’s the first time I’ve wished I were in a longer security line!

While standing in line for immigration, tears started dripping down my face, and I had to struggle to keep it all quiet, as I didn’t fancy sobbing in front of the immigration officer (when you leave Korea, you have to sort of sign out, as it were). I managed to hold it in, but just after the officer stamped my passport (now just 6 pages shy of full), I headed directly to the bathroom, locked myself into a stall, and bawled for a little bit.

I’m lucky, I know, that parting from these members of my family makes me so sad; but the parting is so, so sad. I had a lot of conversations this trip about being close to 30, with my close-to-30 or 30-something friends. We feel our bodies changing. We feel we need to get a hold on our careers. We feel that marriage is a real goal these days. We didn’t say as much, but we feel our mortality.

My grandmother is 75, I think, and my great aunt a few years younger. My father is 57. There’s no guarantee for any of us, at any age, and my grandmother/great aunt are healthy, but I wished them good health with real sincerity in my farewells.

I didn’t get as much accomplished as I wanted to on this trip in terms of … well, anything, I suppose, but especially in terms of deciding where I’m going to apply for firms, which firms, what school-time activities, etc. I shall have no time in Anchorage to think about that stuff, as I’ll be packing up and trying to enjoy my last two days of sweet, sweet summer. I suppose I can try in Seattle.

Oof, Seattle. I am anticipating some mediation skills being put to the test this visit.

And now, the blow-by-blow account of my week in the homeland, starting from Friday.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 26
Today was perm day. The day that it was all supposed to come together like a dream. I had trust in my hairdresser, because she did a fab job last year, and because she came highly recommended by a friend.

Well, she did a fab job. But it was the wrong style, for the wrong person.

I went in thinking that I’d probably like to cut my long hair short and get it straightened again, to look sleek and professional for my upcoming fall interviews. But I was willing to entertain other suggestions, since I placed myself in her hands with excellent results last year. So when she suggested that I try a wave perm, to try out a different look from the straight hair I had all this year, I thought, “Oh, why not?”

So she and her two assistants set to work. They gooped up my hair and put it into rollers, rolled over a bizarre-looking, mind control machine thingee and positioned it over my head. It’s a metal stand with a gray arch that goes over your head. When they turn it on, two arms disengage from that arch and swing slowly down and up, down and up, around your head, emitting lots and hots of heat. Which is wrapped in plastic wrap and heavily gooped, so as to break down the natural structure of your hair.

The machine hums some overplayed classical piece, in very machine-like tones, which is both eery and funny. When the song finishes, the machine is finished, and the arms fold up back into that arch over your head.

It really does look like something evil and “2001”-like.

When that’s done, one of the lowly assistants, decked out in this salon in short black skirt and polo lined in pink, washes the goop out of your hair.

Then it’s back in the chair for the really long procedure, which is ironing out the hair with a hot iron, and curling the ends just so. I swear, they iron, like, 15 strands of hair at a time. It takes forEVER. I felt very sorry for the lowly assistant and the mid-level assistant (decked out in short red skirt and polo edged in gray) who did most of the ironing. My hair is very thick and takes a long time to dry, and the ironing took over an hour.

After the ironing, the hair designer put more goop in my hair, put it in rollers, and left me for another 10 minutes, after which the lowly assistant again washed my hair. She also gave me a Korean-style head massage, which hurt like the dickens and is supposedly very good for stimulating the scalp. Whatever that means.

After that third hair washing, the hair designer cut my hair again, razoring down the long strands and doing her magic. She blow-dried my hair, put some shine-enhancing oil in it, and voila! I had perfectly natural-looking, artfully tousled, wavy hair.

That looked almost exactly like my natural hair.

In fact, my friend Etsuko (who jokingly referred to my, er, development, shall we say, during my time in Seoul as Stage 1 hk, Stage 2 hk, etc.) said I looked very much like I’d returned to my original Stage 1 hk state: glasses, unruly bushy hair. Wah!

Yuri, who had recommended the shop last year, and who came to see me in the last few mintues of the 5-hour-long experience, insisted that I looked fine. But I felt as rumpled inside as my hair was, albeit not as artfully. I had just spent close to $200 to look like I did before I had ever experienced the life-changing straight perm magic.

My discontent continued that night as I complained to my buddy H, who also said I looked fine. We had the most delicious steamed chicken and vegetable dish – mmmm, I miss Korea already – in Gangnam, and then the best frozen yogurt in Asia down the street. Just like the old days. Sigh.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
Busy, busy day. We start out at 9 am at the dentist for a cleaning. For some reason, the dental hygienist, who is otherwise perfectly charming and soothing, feels the need to show me her bloody scraper – bloody with MY blood – in order to impress upon me the abject manner in which I have been attending to my teeth and gums. “See how much it’s gone under the gums?” she scolded, showing me the hooked implement. “Not good.”

I can see my gums bleeding in my reflection in her glasses. Uuuunhh. Feel faint. Grossed out to max. Resolve to brush properly.

Next: temple. My father gets a bit riled when my cousins don’t show up on time for the ancestor worship ritual, which includes their father, dead and gone these 20 years. Once one of them arrives, we get started. The monk begins chanting, we bow, we move bowls of water around an incense bowl, we bow, we listen to more chanting, we bow. This is the ritual that the guidebooks describe as ancestor worship. It’s called jae sa. The table is loaded with rice cakes, pears, tangerines, grapes, bowls of rice. The temple assistant and my father stick a spoon straight down into each bowl of rice; this is the only time an eating utensil should be positioned this way, and I’ve heard countless times that you should never stick your own spoon straight up and down in your rice, because of this very ritual. It’s reserved for dead ancestors, and it’s a little chilling to see it actually done.

(Man! I’m in Osaka and I just checked in and asked if there was any chance I could get bumped up to business class again. I got bumped up on my way here, I explained. The agent smiled, in a very nice way, and said: “I think it was a miracle.”)

After the ritual, we ate temple food and took a look around my father’s old childhood neighborhood. Then it was farewell to my cousins and off to see a friend in another part of town. We had coffee, caught up, and then it was off with her, and on with another friend, at the same coffee house. I swear, it was like I had office hours there or something.

Then I go to Shinchon to meet KB. KB! I was a little nervous, as one generally is when you see an old fling. I didn’t think I harbored any old feelings, but one can never tell.

I actually didn’t want to go all the way to Shinchon. It takes an hour and 15 minutes to get back home, and I was jet-lagged. I also didn’t want to watch rugby on TV in some bar, which is what he was doing with friends that afternoon.

When I called to say I arrived, though, the match was over, and KB was just hanging out with friends. He offered me the option of going out to dinner with them, which meant waiting half an hour or so, or just going to dinner alone. “Either is fine,” I lied (c’mon, I was tired! I didn’t want to deal with strangers!).

He ended up coming alone. I was to meet him in front of the cinema at the station, and I was off buying something from a street vendor when he called. “Are you hiding somewhere?” he asked in Korean. “No, where are you?” “In front of the cinema.”

And then I saw him. And… what did I feel? A little disappointment? A little anxiety, perhaps? Well yes, now that you mention it. And then we were hugging each other, and he asked me where I’d like to eat, in English, and I was a little disappointed.

One of the marvelous things about KB was his insistence on speaking Korean, even with other English speakers. It inspired me to try to do the same. But we broke that rule during his last few days in Seoul, and I guess it stayed broken, because we pretty much spoke English the whole evening.

I’m thinking this through as I write, and I believe it was the lack of zing that disappointed me. KB is still a marvelous person – courteous, humble, fearless, popular with men and women alike. But that zing of attraction was gone. I don’t know why: time? the fact that I’ve been around westerners for a year now? the fleeting nature of a fling? I just know that today, I wouldn’t, where a year and a half ago, I did.

He brought up our time together once, when he mentioned who he’d watched rugby with and I asked, “Do I know your friend Mig?”

“Oh, you know him,” he said. I looked at him quizzically.

“You know, Mig. His house? On the hill? With the snow?” He started laughing. “I remember it quite well.”

“Oooooh, Mig! Yes, I remember. And that wasn’t very gentlemanly of you.” I mildly rebuked. I felt rather embarrassed.

We wandered through Shinchon looking for some place to eat. What a crazy place it is – thousands of college kids walking around, getting drunk, falling over, couples fighting (usually entails Girl looking sulky and annoyed at Very Drunk Boyfriend but helping him walk to whatever destination), people eating grilled beef and soju outside, etc. We finally settled on a noodle joint, where we probably set a record for how long we stayed (most Koreans don’t linger after a meal). We talked about future plans, and reminisced about school days. I caught up on what he was doing back in Korea, and what I was doing, and he asked me the $64,000 question: “But what is it that you really want to do?” Ah, if only I knew, KB.

KB’s mother was coming into town for a visit the next day, so he was planning to stay in Shinchon that night rather than go back to his apartment an hour away, in order to get an early start on getting to the airport. So it was that I could have stayed with him, I suppose, and I did consider it. But it was like it would have been for old times sake, and I was never really in a tizzy about whether to stay or not. Besides, he had a cold, and looked tired.

I complained about my hair to him, explaining that it looked messy and such to me, and KB opined that it looked fine. I replied, “Not to me.” “Well, you’re not trying to pick yourself up, as it were. It looks good to me.”

So, KB, were you trying to pick me up? I’m thinking back and recalling little hints you dropped, that indicated that you were still interested (and who wouldn’t be, really? It’s me, hk, after all). In your own unexpectedly shy way, were you saying, “Yo, baby, yo, yo”? I think maybe so, and I am flattered. But we walked around after dinner in the old dark alleyways, drinking our coffee and talking of this and that, and I don’t regret that we only talked and drank our coffee.

Like the old days, I knew I had to leave at 10:30 or so to catch the train, so we sat down in a concrete park behind the Hyundai department store and took a couple pictures of us together, and then I was off to the train station, where we hugged warmly like the friends we are, and then I went home.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
One of the things I like about living with my grandmothers in Korea is that I am very spoiled by them. It’s not a great exaggeration to say that whatever I want, they try to deliver. So when I arrived and they asked me what I wanted to eat while there, I listed a couple things, including chicken barbeque. And so on the Sunday I was in Seoul, we went to a city about 2 hours away to have its famous chicken barbeque, in its famous chicken barbeque alley.

I’d been there before with Maiko, now probably two and a half years ago, and it was funny how much I remembered: the long walk from the bus station, the kindly man who directed us to the center of town and gave us his business card, the fight with the guesthouse owner about how much we owed, the rainy weekend and shopping underground (I still have the pants we bought), the restaurant in which we ate the barbeque.

The same restaurant was there, but after walking through the alleyway twice, being hailed loudly by various restaurant owners to come and try their delicious BBQ, my dad opted for a place where the owner was inside, serving customers. Shin Tow Buri BBQ. He liked the name, which translates directly as “Body Earth Not Two,” and means, roughly, that we must eat of the earth from whence we came in order to be healthy.

We ate a lot. Oof. Too much. But it was mighty tasty, and it was made sweeter by eating with my grandmother and great aunt, and my father, who cracked jokes with the owner. At the end of the meal, my grandmother happened to mention that I went to Crimson, which is when the owner, who had been commenting on how I must be so quiet because I didn’t know how to speak Korean, got very excited and with wide eyes asked me to sign her autograph book.

Now. This sort of thing is a… Thing with me. In Korea, education is extremely important in setting out your future, and competition for good schools (and hence, good jobs) is unbelievably fierce. So parents start in with the English and computer and other extra activities when their kids are toddlers. To most Koreans, a place like Crimson – no, Crimson itself, actually – is like the promised land. It has a mystical aura about it. There was even a TV show in Korea about “Love at [Crimson].” And there’s precious little chance of coming across a Crimson grad if you’re a regular Joe in Korea, so it takes on even more of an aura.

There’s a little bit of this in the U.S. too, I know, and I don’t like it either. Summer Supe didn’t understand this: “If you come from Crimson,” he explained, “it IS shorthand for saying that you must be pretty fucking smart.”

I guess so, but it doesn’t mean anything in the end – it doesn’t mean you’re better than anyone else, or nicer, or that you’ll be happier than anyone else.

(Am now in Vancouver airport, after nearly 10 hours in economy class, suffering the drop from first class.)

Anyway, I refused to sign the book, and the owner said she was disappointed, and I considered trying to explain my Thing to her in Korean, but I gave up the idea.

My dad suffered through driving three and a half hours back to Seoul after our restaurant foray, and I was in time to meet Etsuko at the subway station near my grandmother’s house. I’d learned from KB that Etsuko was still in Seoul the day before, and he called her for me; I thought for sure she’d be back in Japan by now, after completing her one-year contract with an engineering company.

It was good to see the ever cheerful, practical, and gossipy Etsuko. Since April, when her contract ended, she’s been hanging out at one of our old teacher’s houses, watching over her two kids. She loooooves children, and enjoys the fact that I don’t.

I apologized for not getting in touch with her, explaining that I’d thought she was back in Osaka. She said she’d heard I was coming back for a visit from KB, but that KB hadn’t mentioned anything about dinner with me, so she thought maybe he and I had something private to talk about. Hmm. I told her that we didn’t talk about anything particularly private (which is true), so we both hmm’d a bit about that.

Etsuko ended up staying for dinner and overnight, which pleased my grandmother, since she ate everything and asked for more, and reminded my grandmother, as she told me, of me, hk: a foreigner in a foreign land. “Come over again,” my grandmother invited her. “Any time.”

MONDAY, AUGUST 29
I woke up early with Etsuko, who had to leave by 8 am to go to her Korean language class. I walked her to the subway stop, bade her farewell, and then walked back to the apartment, where I lingered over the computer for too long. Since I was going to be late to meet a friend, my father drove me to her house, which was a bit of an adventure, since I’ve only ever taken the subway and walked there.

I was pleased to spend time with my friend and her daughter, who, at 18 months, is walking and babbling and knows that a wristwatch is the same as a wall clock and dances and stuffs grapes and rice in her mouth until it bulges and likes playing in her bath and pretending to drink the bath water and is, even to my hardened and child-hatin’ eyes, as cute as cute can be. I kind of enjoyed hanging out with her. (I know. I can’t believe it either.)

My friend, whom I met at my old workplace, is this delicate-looking, pretty woman who imbues everything she does with grace and elegance. She used to work for a British airline, and so has very good English skills, and I can picture her at work, handling passengers with the same kind of gentle firmness and kindliness she exhibits toward her daughter. She had quit her job at our old workplace shortly after I left Korea, in order to spend more time with her baby, and I told her I thought she had done the right thing. She thought so too.

“I have time to think now in a way I didn’t have when I worked at the office,” she said. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’m finding my way. Like, I figured out this year that I don’t ever want to work in an office again. I didn’t have to time to realize it when I actually worked in an office, but I really don’t like office work!

“I think you’ll find your way,” she said to me. “My sister took three years off, which made my parents unhappy, and they made life hard for her, but she found that she was interested in psychology, and now she’s a child therapist.”

Heartening words!

When it was time for me to leave for a lunch date, my friend took her daughter out for a walk to the subway stop with me, and the baby willingly gave me a hug and kiss when my friend asked her to. Even for hk, that’s just – aw.

I met my final appointment of the trip in Gangnam, and ate steamed chicken with him as well. Now he’s a happy fellow: a kung fu master who teaches here for a living, and is thinking of working in the adoption field, as he himself is a Korean adoptee (the Korean Danish, if you read this blog last year). I asked him if he ever felt down about not knowing what direction his life is going, and he said, “Of course. But only sometimes. Not that often.”

What is his (and others) secret? One of my friends in Seoul suggested that she and I were both too future-oriented, and resolved to worry less about the future and concentrate on the here and now (which is, incidentally, the phrase on the phone my father lent me during this trip. The phone also shows what time it is in Anchorage: aw). Now that I think of it, she and I also set several goals for ourselves in the next year. (We are also very goal-oriented.) I am supposed to look into transactional legal work, in order to be able to travel, and… er, I forget. But that’s a start.

After lunch, I went back to the hair salon where my perm troubles began on Friday and asked for my hair designer. But alas! She was on vacation! They apologetically suggested another hair designer in the salon, but I would have to pay up, whereas my hairdresser would have fixed my hair for free. As I had been fretting about it for three days, and since my father advised, “It’s worth the money if you don’t look into the mirror every day and think, ‘oh, I hate this!’” and because I couldn’t wait for my hairdresser to come back, I agreed to pay up. Hence, my perm, which I’m now happy with, cost me close to $300 USD, which is starting to get up to US prices, in fact, and is horrifically spendy. (Then again, I probably won’t get it cut for another year, so maybe not.) This is AFTER the new hairdresser asked for a discount for me, and talked to my original hair designer, and everyone did the do-see-do.

So the same process from Friday ensued – the washing, the goop, the brainwashing drying machine, the washing, the agonizingly slow ironing, the goop on rollers, the washing and painful head massage, the styling. But only 3.5 hours this time! God. The same mid-level assistant helped out again, and I felt sorry indeed for her labor. For which I’m sure she is not well reimbursed. Thankless, slow, repetitive, wearying work. But I do really like my hair now. As Etsuko pointed out, we with the wavy hair don’t want perms that make our hair wavy. We want it straight and we want it now.

When I got home on Monday night, my grandmother and great aunt were waiting up so that I could have the pork BBQ that I said I missed. I know, I know. I am SO spoiled. My great aunt had gone out to buy the meat that day, and my grandmother carefully cooked it, and my dad and I ate it with the garlic and peppers and sesame leaves that my grandmother and great aunt harvested from their country garden, and with the soju that my grandmother set out on the table. (Say it with me: spoiled rotten hk!)

I went to sleep without finishing packing, which I completed in the morning (oh, lo these 24 hours ago now), and in the morning, my father and my grandmother and I left my great aunt to shed her tears alone, while we drove to the airport.

I’m now in the airplane from Vancouver to Anchorage. It’ll be a little over 24 hours of travel when I hit home, and I’ve a bit of packing and mailing extraneous stuff and buying another fleece to replace the one I left in business class on the way to Tokyo and donating dishes and food and washing the car and returning library books to do. I’ll probably rest up for the rest of today (Wednesday) and deal with everything tomorrow and the next day. Sigh. The return to responsibilities is never pleasant. Tomorrow starts everything – the completion of my summer in Anchorage, the task of finding a job for next summer, the new year of school, the last weekend on the West Coast before returning pell mell to school and all it entails and symbolizes and reeks of.

Not a very positive note to end on, but I’m tired with travel and sick of airplane seats and feel very bulgy and out of shape. And I miss Korea.