In love

It's a quarter to midnight and I will be undoubtedly paying for this late night tomorrow, but I had to put down a little of what I am feeling.

The Korean Team is here.

My dad, his mother, his aunt, his sister, and his friend -- 5 in all came off the 16 hour flight from Seoul through SF here to Crimson City, and when I saw them all rounding the corner in the washed out light of the airport, my heart leapt.

This was the first plane ride my great-aunt has ever taken. It is the first time she has ever been out of Korea. And there she was, hobbling toward me on her bad leg, a wide smile crinkling her face.

My grandmother -- good-natured, generous, indulgent, autocratic, live-and-let-live, pushy, laughing -- enduring the better part of a day on a plane with her bad back, with that same smile.

My aunt, who lost a son to a construction accident and a husband to cancer, the owner of a fine, sly sense of humor and a pragmatic busy-ness about her, chattering about how thin I'd gotten.

Uncle Know-All, my dad's best friend, here to help drive the RV -- brusque, hurried, rude, generous to a fault, filled with love for my dad.

And my dad -- the irrepressible, unreliable charmer who is somehow able to cut to the front of lines, get pastries from random hotel staff at 9 at night, and talk his way past immigration with dubious documents every six months -- looking tired but pleased to see me, on a trial run of his dream, where he roams the country traveling from temple to temple in his RV...

I laughed with delight when I saw that half of my grandmother's suitcase was food, and a separate huge box was also full of food, and when we were all sitting in one of the hotel rooms eating the instant rice, the ramen and the banchan (side dishes) that my grandmother had packed -- along with a rice cooker, chopsticks and utensils, mind you -- I laughed again, with the sheer, delirious joy of the absurdity and the forethought and the care and pragmatic "yeah, I brought my entire kitchen with me. What? What?" attitude of it all.

But after I had laughed, I also teared up a little bit, thinking of them making this trip to see me graduate from Crimson Law School. Crimson may occupy an important part of American popular culture and imagination, but the effect is magnified in Korea, where so much importance is placed on education and hierarchy. (I was once asked to autograph a restaurant owner's autograph book once because I went to Crimson.)

The Korean Team has never asked me for anything, which was easy enough when I was growing up half a world away, but even when I lived with and around them, all they did was give and give. My aunt came bearing envelopes of money from my cousins and my other aunts and uncles; my grandmother came with a wad of cash that hurt me to take; and my great-aunt, who has very little money, came bearing that wide, wide smile, finally on a great adventure out in the big, vast world.

It hurt my heart to leave them at the hotel (they'll be picking up the RV tomorrow and gallivanting around the Northeast and Canada until graduation day) tonight. While waiting for a cab, my dad said, "You make them so happy. That's good." And so I'm glad I stuck it out (which maybe was never really in question), in part because the Korean Team is so proud and so happy about that $80,000 diploma. I can't cook and I can't speak Korean and I can't do much of anything that's worth a damn, but I can give them that diploma, and this experience, and in a way, it was all worth it for that moment tonight at the airport, where I walked toward five people just brimming over with love.