108 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} 108) wrote,@ 2004-12-01 16:55:00 |
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안녕하새요,도넏스
There's a whole lot less shaking going on in Korea this time. There is also little baking, which is no problem to me. At the request of a good, clean friend in Tokyo's Shitamachi District, I stopped by a Lotte Mart and picked up a 350-milliliter tube of Wiseselect Lotte Korean Red Pepper Paste for just 1,100 won, which is a shitty, tiny sum of money. The woman at the store -- she spoke no English, and wore a handerchief on her head -- kept suggesting more expensive or luxurious red pepper paste, and I had to keep turning her down. That store smelled like a hot box of Q-tips, God bless it, and I remember its smell all the way here, in the "I LOVE" internet cafe, which I only actually like quite a bit. What keeps me from loving the place, today, is the keyboard. Certainly not the din of kids who just got off school and are now playing the hell out of World of Warcraft.
Nothing about this trip has killed me or hurt me yet. I brought a backpack this time, not some crappy duffel bag where all of my belognings get kind of mixed together, so I didn't lose anything. I even still have my cellular phone, this time, which is great news -- though I did have a dream last night that I had lost it. On my cellular phone, I have an outline of a few things I wanted to cover in this entry. They were taken between boarding the plane at Narita and, well, just an hour ago. Behold, in chronological order:
CHINESE MAN SMOKING
Airport security regulations have dropped through the floor. I was discouraged from bringing my PlayStation2 and Dragon Quest VIII (fifteen hours into a second, more enlightened playthrough and yes, still brilliant) by a friend at Sony who said her friend, who also tried to take a PS2 to Korea, just last week, was screamed at during the baggage inspection. Her friend was a Japanese girl. I am a white man. Certainly I faced a higher probability of being screamed at?
I forgot to take off my punk-rock belt, which is about 95% iron, when going through the metal detector. It made a furious sound. A little Japanese woman ran a beeping stick over my body and then waved a gloved hand. "Enjoy your flight," she said, in English. That was that. My new backpack -- a Scottish design, actually -- went through the X-ray. The guy wasn't even looking at the monitor. I stood there, thinking, "Come on, people, am I not fearsome-looking? For fuck's sake, American videogame journalists, the bravest people on earth, lord knows, turn their heads and run from me at such mouth-breathing gatherings as Tokyo Game Show because I'm so scary-looking. Why should airport security turn a yawning eye?
So I hop on a people-mover, gliding by past a long window with a glimpse of a gray sky. Clouds swirling like cigarette smoke. It looked cold outside. It wasn't cold. It was actually quite pleasant. I'd had a nice walk from Ueno. I hopped off the people-mover and shtoonted into a bathroom with a need to pop a neopolitan. Bad tangerines for breakfast, you see. All of the stalls were taken up. I waited alongside a an old fat British man in a Hawaiian shirt who totally might have been Bob Hoskins. We complained about how low the bathroom doors were to the ground. We couldn't see the feet. The doors touched the ceiling. There were no handles outside, no "occupied/vacant" indicator. It was an inefficient bathroom for white people, because white people aren't like Asian people, you know, not rough enough to bang on the door immediately upon entering the bathroom with a need to take a squat. I didn't want to knock on the door, and neither did Bob. Soon enough, a door popped open, and there was some Japanese rocker kid. Bob took that stall, after encouraging me to "Have a good one." Spoken in a British accent, such an Americanism was entertaining and endearing. Then the last stall opened. A Chinese man came out, folding a fat Chinese newspaper. He looked at me and coughed, hard. I sat down on the toilet. Lord, it stank of cigarettes. There was an empty pack of Seven Stars lying in a pile of something not un-nasty on the floor. The guy had puffed it up. He'd sucked them down like Coca-Cola.
He must not like airplanes.
ONE THING WRONG WITH TRAVELING ON TUESDAY
I've ridden planes departing Narita Airort so many dozens of times, Jack, that I know the best day to do it is Tuesday. This is becaus tickets are cheap on Tuesday. Tuesday is a good day to leave.
Except all the weekly Japanese magazines -- well, most of them -- come out on Wednesday. So you're shit out of luck. When it comes to Japanese weekly magazines.
Still, you won't find any store in Japan that stocks as many copies of Shounen Jump or Famitsu as a Narita book kiosk. Lots of impulse purchases. I buy book review rags, sometimes, just because I'm in Narita.
I used to really love airports, when I could just walk up and down the terminals while waiting for someone.
Can't do that anymore, though.
I LIKE TO SHOW UP FASHIONABLY LATE FOR CHECK-IN
I'm always on time when flying overseas. I always check in two hours ahead of time. I always use little travel agencies that no one's ever heard of just so I can walk in and get my ticket without waiting in line. Lately it's Blue Sky Tours that I use. At the E counter in Terminal 1 at Narita, at book 25, they have a counter. It's very lonely. The ladies who work there aren't your traditional young stewardesses. They're old ladies. They're really nice, though. They hand you your departure ticket and your return ticket. This is crucial.
They say the boarding begins at one-twenty-five, which is thirty minutes before the plane leaves, though lord knows you don't have to be there that early. If I'm at gate 14, I like to walk all the way down to gave 40, and wait until about one-twenty, then start the walk back. While waiting, yesterday, I read the first three pages of The Da Vinci Code, the only English-language book at a certain kiosk that didn't look immediately pretentious. Thinking about fucking literature, I read the first ten pages of that popular fiction, and kind of liked it. I thought I'd buy it. It was paperback. It was 2,100 yen. Fuck popular fiction.
When I got back to the gate, it was one-thirty-three. The line for economy-class passengers still waiting to enter the plane was no more than twenty people long. I went and used the bathroom, and when I came back, only two passengers were in line. Yeah, I'm fast as lightning in the bathroom sometmies. I walked right on teh plane and sat down.
I mean really people don't line up like assholes -- it's not a race. You have assigned seats, anyway.
No, on second thought, do line up. It's because you line up that I don't have to.
A cold wind just whipped through this warm internet cafe.
ON THE PLANE THERE WAS A WHITE MAN READING JAMES CLAVELL'S GAIJIN
A gaijin reading Gaijin. Brilliant.
IMMIGRATION CARDS
Immigration cards are the little slips of paper you have to fill out before entering a foreign country. They staple them to your passport after you present them at immigration and they ask you what the hell you want in whatever country you're entering. They hand out the immigration cards on the plane, for whatever god-forsaken reason, though I've yet to meet an airline that gives you a pen as well. When asked for a pen, yesterday, the stewardess said "Ohhhh -- yeah, we don't have pens." Her nametag said she was from Korea; she spoke English like an Illini. She spoke Japanese like a Korean person. She was a really good-looking girl, to the point where I call her a "stewardess" and not a "flight attendant." You see some dumpy little self-hating women working in flight-attending these days. It makes you wonder if the very change in the political-correctness of the name of the profession has invoked a change in the women who apply to the job. Who knows.
I looked over my immigration card on the plane. It ended up being my only piece of reading material. I knew full well there'd be other immigration cards near the immigration counter when I landed in Incheon. Why give me the card on the plane, if you're not allowed to give me a pen? They took a pen from me once, two years ago, before I got on a plane from Tokyo to somewhere not-Tokyo, because it could be used as a weapon. They didn't even search me for pens yesterday. Was I supposed to know they weren't going to, and snuck in a pen, all shamefully, anyway?
I like the Korean immigration card. It's to the point. It asks questions like "Name / Date of birth / Flight number / Previous City / Next City / Passport number."
The Japanese one is nonsensical as shit. See, all immigration cards have two sides -- the one retained by immigration, and the one stapled to your passport, to be taken by immigration on your way out. On th Korean card, the two sides are identical. On the Japanese card, the stapled side is double the width of the retained side, contains twice as many blanks, yet asks all the same questions. Yet the questions are in different places. It's rather obvious that they want to trick you, or else make you think really hard. So you get questions like "EMBARKING VESSEL" and "DISEMBARKING VESSEL." You get "PORT OF EMBARKATION" and "PORT OF DISEMBARKATION." There are boxes to check if you are embarking or disembarking, and it makes me wonder about semantics. I mean, the card on the right is for future use, right? So does that mean that "embarking" and "disembarking" have different meanings than they do in the future?
The Korean card, meanwhile, is very kind. The information to fill out is scarce, polite, and discreet, yet detailed all the same. The information you fill out tells the Korean immigration authorities everything they need to know about you. Not only that -- both sides are things that are intended to be used right now, and filled out according to right now.
The Japanese card -- well, I messed it up once, and only once. I can't tell you how I messed it up. I don't remember. It was something with embarking and disembarking in the future. This was right after September 11, 2001. They took me to a little room and had a cordial chat with me about it. They told me to please not do it again. I cried for a bit, and the cop patted me on the shoulder and told me my baby was dead. He told me to get on the airplane and take off like OJ Simpson, after instructing me again how to fill out the card. I did so. It was cheerful again.
Still, every time I look at that card, on the way back into Japan, I get this mysterious feeling. What's right? What's wrong? Does it matter? Does it matter anymore?
PARAPHRASE "CHUNGKING EXPRESS"
Oh. That's not supposed to be a headline. That's merely a cue I wrote for myself, to spark the headline
YOU KNOW THAT ONE REALLY ATTRACTIVE STEWARDESS YOU ALWAYS SEE? IT WAS ALWAYS MY DREAM TO SEDUCE HER. AND YESTERDAY, I DID.
So yeah, my ears were playing havoc on my brain, and the Japanese-Californian rock dude I shared the whole 747 row with tolerated my lying down, though only after asking me if I was in a band. I told him I was. He was like, "Yeah, you look like that kind of guy. Why are you going to Korea?"
My answer was "HUH?!?!" I couldn't hear. So I laid down and slept, and dreamt of the sea.
Soon, I woke up with need of pissing. I went to the toilet in the very back of the dead-silent, near-empty, cheap-ticketed airplane. The attractive stewardess was sitting there. She looked up at me, and said "Hi." I said, "Hello." I went into the bathroom. I was in there for fifty seconds when a knock came at the door. I opened it up. The girl was standing there.
"Yeah?"
"Are you okay?"
"I -- yeah."
She turned away. I finished washing my hands.
I wonder, now, if she wanted to totally get it on or if she'd simply seen me rubbing my ears and nearly crying in my seat some thirty minutes earlier?
The answer is lost to time. Everything that belonged to that age has vanished. Et cetera.
KOREAN DRAMA STARS ARE BIG IN JAPAN
I don't know why. Standing in line for immigration in Korea, after I'd hurried ahead of the mob to get to a desk and fill out my card -- I'd been racking my brain with plans for which letters to scribe first, second, third . . . throughout the flight -- and then got stuck in a line, anyway, I heard a group of old, fifty-something Japanese women discussing Korea. Many of them were audacious sorts. I'd never heard Japanese women talk like that. They were discussing how to say names of body parts in Korean. One of them knew how to yell "HURRY THE FUCK UP" to the immigration-inspector girl.
It was horrible. The thirty-something Japanese TrendyWoman standing behind me giggled at the old women, and then discussed it with her own mother when the women broke off to go to a "Korean Citizens" counter that was dead-empty, and force the man there to serve them.
"They must be big 'Winter Sonata' fans."
Ahhhhhh, yes. "Winter Sonata." "Fuyu no sonata" in Japanese. It's a Korean drama television series from about five years ago. It's about a guy with messed-up eyes and the girl he loves, and it coasts, over the course of I think twenty-six episodes, to a devastatingly tragic conclusion. The star is a man named Bae Yon-Joon. He is, right now, oddly, the most famous man in Japan. The day before I last came to Korea, the so-called Yon-sama was in Japan being photo-shot for a series of Sony Vaio and CyberShot advertisements. A section manager at Sony was telling me, back then, about how all the "Dumb obasans say they want 'Yon-sama's camera.'" When Yon-sama left Japan last time, in August, this was, he was met by a mob some three-thousand strong at the airport.
This time, just four days ago, Yon-sama was in Tokyo for a photo exhibition detailing his muscular torso. You'd never know it to look at his John-Lennon mop-top hair or John-Lennon-wholesome-yet-kind-of-creepy glasses -- Yon-sama's got the male equivalent of a nice rack. Of muscles. One Japanese girl I know calls him "Mukimukimukimukki Yon-sama-pyooon," which is far, far, far too long a name for a Korean guy to have in Japan. I think she hates him, though. I mean, she says she does. Then again, you'd never know. Girls in cartoons, for example, say they hate the male heroes, yet . . . well. They usually just want to ride that snake all night long.
So yes.
Yon-sama came through Narita Airport, now wearing sunglasses. I saw it go down on TV, eating noodles with a woman, the night before I myself would board the plane. The woman was talking about Yon-sama's torso, and I was wondering why I'd never seen it.
"He looks like a . . . poof."
"Well -- well! He does! Yet he has these muscles. That's why the girls, you know, like him."
"Ah."
"They think he's like the pinnacle of the new-age star-actor. He looks like he has a literary sensitivity, yet he also has these muscles."
"Probably because he was in the army for the mandatory two years?"
"No, no, he wasn't in the army. He was exempted." She poked a chopstick gently at her eye. "His eye is fucked-up somehow. Like the character in the drama. He actually has kind of a -- background."
"I thought you said you hated him?"
She had, for the record, said that. Every girl I know says she hates him.
"I -- I never said that. I . . . DO, though! I just happen to, you know, know a lot about him."
"Well, okay."
On TV, the mob was growing. An airport security officer came through with a megaphone, telling the women, "Look, Yon-sama isn't coming through here. He's taking a special route. We have arranged a special, private route for him."
The crowd of women went nuts with anger. They would not leave. One of the dumb old bitches (sorry; I must call them that, for it is the only word I think fits) spotted him getting out of a limo on the tarmac somewhere and screamed like she'd just been slashed across the back with a straight razor.
"IT'S YON-SAMAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!1!!"
It was indeed him. The mob went nuts. One of his bodyguards pointed up at the bubbling mass of congealed womanflesh in the window, and Yon-sama looked up, and then quickly down.
Then I saw something that broke my heart. Many women were crowded around the gate where Yon-sama was boarding the plane back to Korea. Many women had booked the same flight, so obsessive was their fandom. I take it the flight filled up fast. Many women had booked other flights. Spoke one old widow in her late sixties, a widow who said she had grandchildren in middle school:
"I bought a ticket for a plane to Taiwan just so I could get through the security check and see Yon-sama."
Yon-sama got on the plane, after looking at the crowd of rich, bored women and smiling a terrified smile. When asked by NHK how his trip to Japan went, he said "It went well." When asked when he's coming back, he replied "I don't know yet. Soon, maybe."
The old woman said, later,
"All I wanted was one look. He looked at me. I get the feeling now that it's alright for me to die."
Hearing this, I was filled with the most awesome anger. I've been accused before of being something of a fatalist, and maybe, sometimes, that's what I am. Though here's what I say to that old woman -- you are grown-up now. The time for you to engage in selfish exercises like Baetlemania has coming and gone. You have a family. You could have used the money you wasted on a plane ticket you have no intention to use on a PlayStation2 and Dragon Quest VIII for your grandchildren. Yon-sama's smile did not make it time for you to die; your decision to come to Narita to see him is what made it time for you to die.
Yes, devoted fans, with a little work, you too can be passively cruel to old people without being wrong.
NOW I AM FULL OF DONUTS
Last night, I met Oscar, and we had some ramen, some dumplings, some rice noodles, some kimchee, and some Coca-Cola. We partied at an internet cafe. We screamed at people. He witnessed a statuesque young goddess of a Family Mart girl mack on me hard and fearsomely without saying any words other than "SANKYU."
We had donuts. The first one, a chocolate-on-chocolate donut with chocolate sprinkles, in one bite, took six hours off my life. When I woke up at noon this day, I had a Coke hangover. Oscar was gone. I tried to take a shower, and the water wouldn't come out in any color other than frigid. I sat on the toilet and read Five Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway cover-to-cover without realizing that I could see a crucifix right outside the fourth-floor bathroom window. I went out and bought a big box of Kellogg's Almond Flake cereal and some Korean red pepper paste, with the intention of going home, putting the paste in my backpack, and eating the cereal with milk. (Note: I would later do this, before coming here.)
I saw, in the aisle opposite the pepper paste, hotcake mix. I thought of getting it, thought of inviting Oscar to a hotcake party at his own damn house. I didn't do it. Because soon, I saw donut mix.
When I saw the donut mix, I remembered a girl I knew in college. Her name was Hazel, kind of, and she was from Singapore. She and I fried donuts one day, in a Chinese deep-fryer. She was a medical student at Indiana University Hospital, and her boyfriend was a medical student in Singapore. My girlfriend was a grad student at Harvard. I was an undergrad at Indiana University. I saw Hazel infrequently, yet I think that I really loved her. She loved me as well. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. She tried to make me realize, three times, that she loved me. Each time, I knew precisely what she was doing. When we fried donuts together, we did it without love. Love, which I like to think of as a kind of non-omnipresent god, as a kind of something with eyes, had turned its attention to something else for the afternoon Hazel and I fried donuts. It amounted to a mostly beautifully mundane exercise.
We ate them with powdered sugar.
I'd like to say they were the most delicious donuts I've ever tasted. They weren't, however. The most delicious ones were with my Korean friend in Korea last December. Dead broke and upset about a lot of (homeless-related) things, I showed up in Seoul and was treated to a box of donuts. This Korean friend was a girl who introduced me to my second ex-girlfriend, four years ago now. It becomes a longer time ago every day. That ex-girlfriend was from Pusan, she was a violinist, her birthday was September 11th, 1980, and her name was Sihyang. She was the only Korean person in Korea named Sihyang, and all the more beauitiful for it. She reminded me of Hazel, though only when I was tricked into thinking about Hazel, which was about four or five times in two years.
Sihyang once told me about frying donuts. Her mother brought a bag of donut mix home from the supermarket one night, and made donuts for Sihyang. Sihyang was nine years old, and the tallest kid in her school. She was five feet three inches. The next two years would see her growing to five-foot-seven. She wouldn't grow any taller than that, though for two years, teachers and students alike were excited that Sihyang might have a future as a basketball player. Her appetite for those two years was insatiable. Her mother was bringing her bags of Kraft mozzarella cheese, which she ate cold and begged for more. She ate cereal with milk. She ate ramen noodles with cheese.
She told me once about how her mother was "the best mother in the world" because of the donuts. "When she made those donuts it was like the BEST THING ANYONE'S MOTHER HAS EVER DONE FOR THEM LIKE TOTALLY and we had powdered sugar."
I thought hard, that day she told me that, about half as hard as I thought about it today. Then, I thought that Sihyang was beginning to tire me with her love for Korea. Today, I realize that Korea is that kind of place. It's a great place to live. It's a great place to be from. If you're the hero of an adventure novel, and your adventure takes place in the jungles of South America, or anyplace that isn't Korea, if you're from Korea, you're going to have a lot to talk about, a lot more than anyone from anywhere else would.
To wit: Sihyang once cut up an old credit card. She looked at the cut-in-half hologram, and screamed. "Look!" I looked. The image of a star had split, and could be seen on both sides, smaller than before.
"KOREAN CREDIT CARDS ARE LIKE SO FUCKING AMAZING"
That was a really beautiful thing to say. I think it was the most beautiful thing anyone ever said in my presence, for various reasons. It made me want to cry. I eventually made a mistake, and now Sihyang is gone somewhere else, and I'm left associating with her old best friend in Korea, talking about her ghost. I'm going to meet this friend in Kangnam tomorrow, and we'll have noodles and talk about the past in sad voices while an old Korean woman brings us complimentary Coca-Cola and tells us a little caffeine is good for us because we're young, and warns us against eating burnt toast because it'll give you cancer. I'll be reminded, as I'm sure I will be for a while, of the day Sihyang told me about the donuts her mother made for her, and how it took me until I saw a bag of donut mix in this country to realize that Korea is this kind of place. It's the kind of place where the donuts a mother makes for her daughter are, indisputably, the best donuts in the world. I live my whole life trapped in a cigarette-stinking bathroom stall with no door handle, no window from which I can see a crucifix, and a book I've already read, longing to taste those donuts with my own teeth. I'll be reminded of this feeling by various things for a long time, until one dry-cold day the sun comes up, I awake, fix myself a breakfast, and begin, without knowing, a period in time where I don't remember anything anymore.
There's a whole lot less shaking going on in Korea this time. There is also little baking, which is no problem to me. At the request of a good, clean friend in Tokyo's Shitamachi District, I stopped by a Lotte Mart and picked up a 350-milliliter tube of Wiseselect Lotte Korean Red Pepper Paste for just 1,100 won, which is a shitty, tiny sum of money. The woman at the store -- she spoke no English, and wore a handerchief on her head -- kept suggesting more expensive or luxurious red pepper paste, and I had to keep turning her down. That store smelled like a hot box of Q-tips, God bless it, and I remember its smell all the way here, in the "I LOVE" internet cafe, which I only actually like quite a bit. What keeps me from loving the place, today, is the keyboard. Certainly not the din of kids who just got off school and are now playing the hell out of World of Warcraft.
Nothing about this trip has killed me or hurt me yet. I brought a backpack this time, not some crappy duffel bag where all of my belognings get kind of mixed together, so I didn't lose anything. I even still have my cellular phone, this time, which is great news -- though I did have a dream last night that I had lost it. On my cellular phone, I have an outline of a few things I wanted to cover in this entry. They were taken between boarding the plane at Narita and, well, just an hour ago. Behold, in chronological order:
CHINESE MAN SMOKING
Airport security regulations have dropped through the floor. I was discouraged from bringing my PlayStation2 and Dragon Quest VIII (fifteen hours into a second, more enlightened playthrough and yes, still brilliant) by a friend at Sony who said her friend, who also tried to take a PS2 to Korea, just last week, was screamed at during the baggage inspection. Her friend was a Japanese girl. I am a white man. Certainly I faced a higher probability of being screamed at?
I forgot to take off my punk-rock belt, which is about 95% iron, when going through the metal detector. It made a furious sound. A little Japanese woman ran a beeping stick over my body and then waved a gloved hand. "Enjoy your flight," she said, in English. That was that. My new backpack -- a Scottish design, actually -- went through the X-ray. The guy wasn't even looking at the monitor. I stood there, thinking, "Come on, people, am I not fearsome-looking? For fuck's sake, American videogame journalists, the bravest people on earth, lord knows, turn their heads and run from me at such mouth-breathing gatherings as Tokyo Game Show because I'm so scary-looking. Why should airport security turn a yawning eye?
So I hop on a people-mover, gliding by past a long window with a glimpse of a gray sky. Clouds swirling like cigarette smoke. It looked cold outside. It wasn't cold. It was actually quite pleasant. I'd had a nice walk from Ueno. I hopped off the people-mover and shtoonted into a bathroom with a need to pop a neopolitan. Bad tangerines for breakfast, you see. All of the stalls were taken up. I waited alongside a an old fat British man in a Hawaiian shirt who totally might have been Bob Hoskins. We complained about how low the bathroom doors were to the ground. We couldn't see the feet. The doors touched the ceiling. There were no handles outside, no "occupied/vacant" indicator. It was an inefficient bathroom for white people, because white people aren't like Asian people, you know, not rough enough to bang on the door immediately upon entering the bathroom with a need to take a squat. I didn't want to knock on the door, and neither did Bob. Soon enough, a door popped open, and there was some Japanese rocker kid. Bob took that stall, after encouraging me to "Have a good one." Spoken in a British accent, such an Americanism was entertaining and endearing. Then the last stall opened. A Chinese man came out, folding a fat Chinese newspaper. He looked at me and coughed, hard. I sat down on the toilet. Lord, it stank of cigarettes. There was an empty pack of Seven Stars lying in a pile of something not un-nasty on the floor. The guy had puffed it up. He'd sucked them down like Coca-Cola.
He must not like airplanes.
ONE THING WRONG WITH TRAVELING ON TUESDAY
I've ridden planes departing Narita Airort so many dozens of times, Jack, that I know the best day to do it is Tuesday. This is becaus tickets are cheap on Tuesday. Tuesday is a good day to leave.
Except all the weekly Japanese magazines -- well, most of them -- come out on Wednesday. So you're shit out of luck. When it comes to Japanese weekly magazines.
Still, you won't find any store in Japan that stocks as many copies of Shounen Jump or Famitsu as a Narita book kiosk. Lots of impulse purchases. I buy book review rags, sometimes, just because I'm in Narita.
I used to really love airports, when I could just walk up and down the terminals while waiting for someone.
Can't do that anymore, though.
I LIKE TO SHOW UP FASHIONABLY LATE FOR CHECK-IN
I'm always on time when flying overseas. I always check in two hours ahead of time. I always use little travel agencies that no one's ever heard of just so I can walk in and get my ticket without waiting in line. Lately it's Blue Sky Tours that I use. At the E counter in Terminal 1 at Narita, at book 25, they have a counter. It's very lonely. The ladies who work there aren't your traditional young stewardesses. They're old ladies. They're really nice, though. They hand you your departure ticket and your return ticket. This is crucial.
They say the boarding begins at one-twenty-five, which is thirty minutes before the plane leaves, though lord knows you don't have to be there that early. If I'm at gate 14, I like to walk all the way down to gave 40, and wait until about one-twenty, then start the walk back. While waiting, yesterday, I read the first three pages of The Da Vinci Code, the only English-language book at a certain kiosk that didn't look immediately pretentious. Thinking about fucking literature, I read the first ten pages of that popular fiction, and kind of liked it. I thought I'd buy it. It was paperback. It was 2,100 yen. Fuck popular fiction.
When I got back to the gate, it was one-thirty-three. The line for economy-class passengers still waiting to enter the plane was no more than twenty people long. I went and used the bathroom, and when I came back, only two passengers were in line. Yeah, I'm fast as lightning in the bathroom sometmies. I walked right on teh plane and sat down.
I mean really people don't line up like assholes -- it's not a race. You have assigned seats, anyway.
No, on second thought, do line up. It's because you line up that I don't have to.
A cold wind just whipped through this warm internet cafe.
ON THE PLANE THERE WAS A WHITE MAN READING JAMES CLAVELL'S GAIJIN
A gaijin reading Gaijin. Brilliant.
IMMIGRATION CARDS
Immigration cards are the little slips of paper you have to fill out before entering a foreign country. They staple them to your passport after you present them at immigration and they ask you what the hell you want in whatever country you're entering. They hand out the immigration cards on the plane, for whatever god-forsaken reason, though I've yet to meet an airline that gives you a pen as well. When asked for a pen, yesterday, the stewardess said "Ohhhh -- yeah, we don't have pens." Her nametag said she was from Korea; she spoke English like an Illini. She spoke Japanese like a Korean person. She was a really good-looking girl, to the point where I call her a "stewardess" and not a "flight attendant." You see some dumpy little self-hating women working in flight-attending these days. It makes you wonder if the very change in the political-correctness of the name of the profession has invoked a change in the women who apply to the job. Who knows.
I looked over my immigration card on the plane. It ended up being my only piece of reading material. I knew full well there'd be other immigration cards near the immigration counter when I landed in Incheon. Why give me the card on the plane, if you're not allowed to give me a pen? They took a pen from me once, two years ago, before I got on a plane from Tokyo to somewhere not-Tokyo, because it could be used as a weapon. They didn't even search me for pens yesterday. Was I supposed to know they weren't going to, and snuck in a pen, all shamefully, anyway?
I like the Korean immigration card. It's to the point. It asks questions like "Name / Date of birth / Flight number / Previous City / Next City / Passport number."
The Japanese one is nonsensical as shit. See, all immigration cards have two sides -- the one retained by immigration, and the one stapled to your passport, to be taken by immigration on your way out. On th Korean card, the two sides are identical. On the Japanese card, the stapled side is double the width of the retained side, contains twice as many blanks, yet asks all the same questions. Yet the questions are in different places. It's rather obvious that they want to trick you, or else make you think really hard. So you get questions like "EMBARKING VESSEL" and "DISEMBARKING VESSEL." You get "PORT OF EMBARKATION" and "PORT OF DISEMBARKATION." There are boxes to check if you are embarking or disembarking, and it makes me wonder about semantics. I mean, the card on the right is for future use, right? So does that mean that "embarking" and "disembarking" have different meanings than they do in the future?
The Korean card, meanwhile, is very kind. The information to fill out is scarce, polite, and discreet, yet detailed all the same. The information you fill out tells the Korean immigration authorities everything they need to know about you. Not only that -- both sides are things that are intended to be used right now, and filled out according to right now.
The Japanese card -- well, I messed it up once, and only once. I can't tell you how I messed it up. I don't remember. It was something with embarking and disembarking in the future. This was right after September 11, 2001. They took me to a little room and had a cordial chat with me about it. They told me to please not do it again. I cried for a bit, and the cop patted me on the shoulder and told me my baby was dead. He told me to get on the airplane and take off like OJ Simpson, after instructing me again how to fill out the card. I did so. It was cheerful again.
Still, every time I look at that card, on the way back into Japan, I get this mysterious feeling. What's right? What's wrong? Does it matter? Does it matter anymore?
PARAPHRASE "CHUNGKING EXPRESS"
Oh. That's not supposed to be a headline. That's merely a cue I wrote for myself, to spark the headline
YOU KNOW THAT ONE REALLY ATTRACTIVE STEWARDESS YOU ALWAYS SEE? IT WAS ALWAYS MY DREAM TO SEDUCE HER. AND YESTERDAY, I DID.
So yeah, my ears were playing havoc on my brain, and the Japanese-Californian rock dude I shared the whole 747 row with tolerated my lying down, though only after asking me if I was in a band. I told him I was. He was like, "Yeah, you look like that kind of guy. Why are you going to Korea?"
My answer was "HUH?!?!" I couldn't hear. So I laid down and slept, and dreamt of the sea.
Soon, I woke up with need of pissing. I went to the toilet in the very back of the dead-silent, near-empty, cheap-ticketed airplane. The attractive stewardess was sitting there. She looked up at me, and said "Hi." I said, "Hello." I went into the bathroom. I was in there for fifty seconds when a knock came at the door. I opened it up. The girl was standing there.
"Yeah?"
"Are you okay?"
"I -- yeah."
She turned away. I finished washing my hands.
I wonder, now, if she wanted to totally get it on or if she'd simply seen me rubbing my ears and nearly crying in my seat some thirty minutes earlier?
The answer is lost to time. Everything that belonged to that age has vanished. Et cetera.
KOREAN DRAMA STARS ARE BIG IN JAPAN
I don't know why. Standing in line for immigration in Korea, after I'd hurried ahead of the mob to get to a desk and fill out my card -- I'd been racking my brain with plans for which letters to scribe first, second, third . . . throughout the flight -- and then got stuck in a line, anyway, I heard a group of old, fifty-something Japanese women discussing Korea. Many of them were audacious sorts. I'd never heard Japanese women talk like that. They were discussing how to say names of body parts in Korean. One of them knew how to yell "HURRY THE FUCK UP" to the immigration-inspector girl.
It was horrible. The thirty-something Japanese TrendyWoman standing behind me giggled at the old women, and then discussed it with her own mother when the women broke off to go to a "Korean Citizens" counter that was dead-empty, and force the man there to serve them.
"They must be big 'Winter Sonata' fans."
Ahhhhhh, yes. "Winter Sonata." "Fuyu no sonata" in Japanese. It's a Korean drama television series from about five years ago. It's about a guy with messed-up eyes and the girl he loves, and it coasts, over the course of I think twenty-six episodes, to a devastatingly tragic conclusion. The star is a man named Bae Yon-Joon. He is, right now, oddly, the most famous man in Japan. The day before I last came to Korea, the so-called Yon-sama was in Japan being photo-shot for a series of Sony Vaio and CyberShot advertisements. A section manager at Sony was telling me, back then, about how all the "Dumb obasans say they want 'Yon-sama's camera.'" When Yon-sama left Japan last time, in August, this was, he was met by a mob some three-thousand strong at the airport.
This time, just four days ago, Yon-sama was in Tokyo for a photo exhibition detailing his muscular torso. You'd never know it to look at his John-Lennon mop-top hair or John-Lennon-wholesome-yet-kind-of-creepy glasses -- Yon-sama's got the male equivalent of a nice rack. Of muscles. One Japanese girl I know calls him "Mukimukimukimukki Yon-sama-pyooon," which is far, far, far too long a name for a Korean guy to have in Japan. I think she hates him, though. I mean, she says she does. Then again, you'd never know. Girls in cartoons, for example, say they hate the male heroes, yet . . . well. They usually just want to ride that snake all night long.
So yes.
Yon-sama came through Narita Airport, now wearing sunglasses. I saw it go down on TV, eating noodles with a woman, the night before I myself would board the plane. The woman was talking about Yon-sama's torso, and I was wondering why I'd never seen it.
"He looks like a . . . poof."
"Well -- well! He does! Yet he has these muscles. That's why the girls, you know, like him."
"Ah."
"They think he's like the pinnacle of the new-age star-actor. He looks like he has a literary sensitivity, yet he also has these muscles."
"Probably because he was in the army for the mandatory two years?"
"No, no, he wasn't in the army. He was exempted." She poked a chopstick gently at her eye. "His eye is fucked-up somehow. Like the character in the drama. He actually has kind of a -- background."
"I thought you said you hated him?"
She had, for the record, said that. Every girl I know says she hates him.
"I -- I never said that. I . . . DO, though! I just happen to, you know, know a lot about him."
"Well, okay."
On TV, the mob was growing. An airport security officer came through with a megaphone, telling the women, "Look, Yon-sama isn't coming through here. He's taking a special route. We have arranged a special, private route for him."
The crowd of women went nuts with anger. They would not leave. One of the dumb old bitches (sorry; I must call them that, for it is the only word I think fits) spotted him getting out of a limo on the tarmac somewhere and screamed like she'd just been slashed across the back with a straight razor.
"IT'S YON-SAMAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!1!!"
It was indeed him. The mob went nuts. One of his bodyguards pointed up at the bubbling mass of congealed womanflesh in the window, and Yon-sama looked up, and then quickly down.
Then I saw something that broke my heart. Many women were crowded around the gate where Yon-sama was boarding the plane back to Korea. Many women had booked the same flight, so obsessive was their fandom. I take it the flight filled up fast. Many women had booked other flights. Spoke one old widow in her late sixties, a widow who said she had grandchildren in middle school:
"I bought a ticket for a plane to Taiwan just so I could get through the security check and see Yon-sama."
Yon-sama got on the plane, after looking at the crowd of rich, bored women and smiling a terrified smile. When asked by NHK how his trip to Japan went, he said "It went well." When asked when he's coming back, he replied "I don't know yet. Soon, maybe."
The old woman said, later,
"All I wanted was one look. He looked at me. I get the feeling now that it's alright for me to die."
Hearing this, I was filled with the most awesome anger. I've been accused before of being something of a fatalist, and maybe, sometimes, that's what I am. Though here's what I say to that old woman -- you are grown-up now. The time for you to engage in selfish exercises like Baetlemania has coming and gone. You have a family. You could have used the money you wasted on a plane ticket you have no intention to use on a PlayStation2 and Dragon Quest VIII for your grandchildren. Yon-sama's smile did not make it time for you to die; your decision to come to Narita to see him is what made it time for you to die.
Yes, devoted fans, with a little work, you too can be passively cruel to old people without being wrong.
NOW I AM FULL OF DONUTS
Last night, I met Oscar, and we had some ramen, some dumplings, some rice noodles, some kimchee, and some Coca-Cola. We partied at an internet cafe. We screamed at people. He witnessed a statuesque young goddess of a Family Mart girl mack on me hard and fearsomely without saying any words other than "SANKYU."
We had donuts. The first one, a chocolate-on-chocolate donut with chocolate sprinkles, in one bite, took six hours off my life. When I woke up at noon this day, I had a Coke hangover. Oscar was gone. I tried to take a shower, and the water wouldn't come out in any color other than frigid. I sat on the toilet and read Five Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway cover-to-cover without realizing that I could see a crucifix right outside the fourth-floor bathroom window. I went out and bought a big box of Kellogg's Almond Flake cereal and some Korean red pepper paste, with the intention of going home, putting the paste in my backpack, and eating the cereal with milk. (Note: I would later do this, before coming here.)
I saw, in the aisle opposite the pepper paste, hotcake mix. I thought of getting it, thought of inviting Oscar to a hotcake party at his own damn house. I didn't do it. Because soon, I saw donut mix.
When I saw the donut mix, I remembered a girl I knew in college. Her name was Hazel, kind of, and she was from Singapore. She and I fried donuts one day, in a Chinese deep-fryer. She was a medical student at Indiana University Hospital, and her boyfriend was a medical student in Singapore. My girlfriend was a grad student at Harvard. I was an undergrad at Indiana University. I saw Hazel infrequently, yet I think that I really loved her. She loved me as well. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. She tried to make me realize, three times, that she loved me. Each time, I knew precisely what she was doing. When we fried donuts together, we did it without love. Love, which I like to think of as a kind of non-omnipresent god, as a kind of something with eyes, had turned its attention to something else for the afternoon Hazel and I fried donuts. It amounted to a mostly beautifully mundane exercise.
We ate them with powdered sugar.
I'd like to say they were the most delicious donuts I've ever tasted. They weren't, however. The most delicious ones were with my Korean friend in Korea last December. Dead broke and upset about a lot of (homeless-related) things, I showed up in Seoul and was treated to a box of donuts. This Korean friend was a girl who introduced me to my second ex-girlfriend, four years ago now. It becomes a longer time ago every day. That ex-girlfriend was from Pusan, she was a violinist, her birthday was September 11th, 1980, and her name was Sihyang. She was the only Korean person in Korea named Sihyang, and all the more beauitiful for it. She reminded me of Hazel, though only when I was tricked into thinking about Hazel, which was about four or five times in two years.
Sihyang once told me about frying donuts. Her mother brought a bag of donut mix home from the supermarket one night, and made donuts for Sihyang. Sihyang was nine years old, and the tallest kid in her school. She was five feet three inches. The next two years would see her growing to five-foot-seven. She wouldn't grow any taller than that, though for two years, teachers and students alike were excited that Sihyang might have a future as a basketball player. Her appetite for those two years was insatiable. Her mother was bringing her bags of Kraft mozzarella cheese, which she ate cold and begged for more. She ate cereal with milk. She ate ramen noodles with cheese.
She told me once about how her mother was "the best mother in the world" because of the donuts. "When she made those donuts it was like the BEST THING ANYONE'S MOTHER HAS EVER DONE FOR THEM LIKE TOTALLY and we had powdered sugar."
I thought hard, that day she told me that, about half as hard as I thought about it today. Then, I thought that Sihyang was beginning to tire me with her love for Korea. Today, I realize that Korea is that kind of place. It's a great place to live. It's a great place to be from. If you're the hero of an adventure novel, and your adventure takes place in the jungles of South America, or anyplace that isn't Korea, if you're from Korea, you're going to have a lot to talk about, a lot more than anyone from anywhere else would.
To wit: Sihyang once cut up an old credit card. She looked at the cut-in-half hologram, and screamed. "Look!" I looked. The image of a star had split, and could be seen on both sides, smaller than before.
"KOREAN CREDIT CARDS ARE LIKE SO FUCKING AMAZING"
That was a really beautiful thing to say. I think it was the most beautiful thing anyone ever said in my presence, for various reasons. It made me want to cry. I eventually made a mistake, and now Sihyang is gone somewhere else, and I'm left associating with her old best friend in Korea, talking about her ghost. I'm going to meet this friend in Kangnam tomorrow, and we'll have noodles and talk about the past in sad voices while an old Korean woman brings us complimentary Coca-Cola and tells us a little caffeine is good for us because we're young, and warns us against eating burnt toast because it'll give you cancer. I'll be reminded, as I'm sure I will be for a while, of the day Sihyang told me about the donuts her mother made for her, and how it took me until I saw a bag of donut mix in this country to realize that Korea is this kind of place. It's the kind of place where the donuts a mother makes for her daughter are, indisputably, the best donuts in the world. I live my whole life trapped in a cigarette-stinking bathroom stall with no door handle, no window from which I can see a crucifix, and a book I've already read, longing to taste those donuts with my own teeth. I'll be reminded of this feeling by various things for a long time, until one dry-cold day the sun comes up, I awake, fix myself a breakfast, and begin, without knowing, a period in time where I don't remember anything anymore.
