I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR

“She felt as if, with a distant click, something had switched places inside her. This marks a borderline, she felt strongly. From now on, I will no longer be the person I was.”

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

back to reading stuff that’s not written in chinese characters!

birthday flight to beijing tomorrow wooooooooooooooooo

I just got a new camera lens from my parents for my upcoming twenty-first birthday.  This is the first birthday present I got from them in a long time, and it’s pretty fascinating.  

The biggest present I got from my parents was my upright piano. I think I was six or seven, and I probably had just started playing small Haydn or Mozart sonatines.  I once shared this story in my freshman seminar class, when we were reading Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, a fictionalized autobiography of Buddy Bolden. There’s a part when little Buddy gets his first trumpet from his dad, and everyone in his family gets excited because it’s the first kind of live music they had in the house.  None of my parents have musical backgrounds, so when they bought me a piano, it was a pretty big deal.  It wasn’t just that Hyerin got a piano of her own - it was more like we have a piano in our house now that can make cool sounds anytime we want.  My mom especially, who stays home most of the time, listened to a lot of Beethoven, Mozart, and most of Chopin, thanks to the first big thing she bought for her first child. I think listening to the sound of my piano echoing around the house introduced them into the world of classical music, somewhat imposingly but also naturally.  This past New Year’s eve, both my parents came to a concert with me to listen to Mahler’s Titan, and immediately fell in love with it.  Although I wouldn’t call them or even myself big classical music lovers, I at least like to think that they’ve gotten some fun out of their own purchase, circa 1997.  It’s a thankful thing.

Something similar happened in our family when my brother got his first pair of turntables and speakers. It’s surprising (mildly shocking, even) that my parents don’t cover their ears when he practices scratching.  Unlike me, my brother has eventually chosen to go professional in music, and it’s nice to have supportive parents who don’t frown upon what he truly loves.  Although those machines were not presents from parents like my piano was, it’s funny to see how similar the effects they brought to our household are.

The parents recently decided to buy a TV for themselves.  The reason why we haven’t had a TV in the house for such a long time was because both of the kids hated it.  Now that neither of them are really home for most of the time, my parents are resorting back to the conventional form of entertainment in the absence of the piano player or the disk jockey.  The truth may be that they are freeing themselves from “having to like” what their kids like, or having to listen to whatever sounds their kids made - no more pressure.  Or maybe they really don’t have any other options to replace the presence of the lively children my brother and I used to be.

A 33-year-old bright young woman currently finishing up her education at Harvard, a woman whose career is already so successful that she pays her own tuition while having enough fun, told me yesterday to ”forget about law schools and find a cute, rich husband.”

The entire idea was not completely foreign to me.  I’ve met some three girls of my age saying almost the exact same thing.  It is also how the happy endings to most Korean dramas look like.  But coming from such an Alpha girl, it still occurred to me as a mild shock.  

She made me imagine I’m a 33-year-old living in Seoul, and just met a person, probably work-related.  After a few minutes of a friendly chat, the person asks how old I am, and I answer.  The next question immediately following is bound to be: “what does your husband do?”  I answer that I’m single, and we both try to move onto a new topic with awkward smiles.  What about if I’m 40?  The same person would most likely ask questions about my kids.  The same awkwardness will ensue for the rest of our conversation.

Really? THAT’s the reasons behind your heinous advice? To avoid those awkward moments with all the strangers you probably don’t really need to care much? Does it really matter?

It does, according to this friend of mine.  That short response acknowledging the fact that you’re still single at an age most people would assume as marriageable in fact establishes you as an anomaly among all the other people who marry at the “right ages.” And no matter how weird or unconventional or fiercely feminist you are, you don’t want that.

However, I soon realized how this whole frustration over not-being-able-to-not-get-married, a whiny voice of an Ivy League-educated successful young woman that many would label as elitist, is just not necessary after all.  I say the same thing for people who say they are “against long distance relationships” or they’re “not looking for anything serious right now,” when they’re not actually in a relationship at the moment.  These comments by single females and males are just so not necessary.  People talk about relationships largely based on their limited observations and previous experiences.  No one knows how the next person you fall in love will be like, whether the person would fit into those “principles” you’ve set up for yourself following the failure of your previous relationships.  Only later do we realize how silly it was to let go of a person because we were afraid of having a LDR or because we were not looking for something serious atm.

Same thing for this woman friend, but an anti-relationship version.  You’re successful.  You’re intelligent.  You’re a socially functional human being whose life is filled with friends and family of all ages and genders.  If the reason why you’re telling a 20-year-old fellow woman to get a husband instead of a doctorate degree is because you feel vulnerable towards those eyes looking at you as an anomaly, you might not deserve what you have right now.  You said you’re jealous of your friends happily married to rich men instead of shoving abstruse knowledge into your brain -  no one knows who will be the real happy one, say five years later.  You may realize later how unnecessary it was to give this “life advice” to a girl who looks up to you as her role model, who dreams of a life full of intellectual and professional exploration but not specifically of marriage.