It wasn't pretty.
But we had a giant snake puppet track all the way across the ceiling of the theater above the heads of the audience. No regrets. Take that, Phantom.
Aside from being debilitatingly busy -- I've been mildly sick ever since we closed this past weekend, running a low-grade fever at night -- there has been one thread weaving its way through from orientation before classes to me sitting here now.
As I was sitting there in the audience of the theater, waiting for the next person to talk to us about IT or turning our receipts into the business office or whatever else we needed to be re-oriented about for the new school year, I saw some of my friends a bit farther down the row crowding around the screen of one person's phone. They were all watching some video, as the owner of the phone pointed out the mechanics of the dance moves happening. I was far enough away that while I could see the brightly colored clothing and energetic movements, I couldn't make out who was performing or hear any of the music. Ah, well, I thought, another trend that I could only hope would be performed at some party or another at some point during the year.
I didn't give it much more thought than that, though I noted its ubiquity over the subsequent couple of weeks, with even the producer for the show I was stage managing telling how she had gone home one night only to find her 18-month old dancing that dance which is all the rage for the babysitter.
On a completely separate track, my Facebook feed had been peppered by some K-pop Youtube video that apparently a lot of people had been watching.
It was only when the "Gandalf Style" parody was posted that I was hooked by geek bait and then, that light bulb slowly began glowing over my head. And it took a while for my brain to integrate the information that this K-pop song and this raging trend that was sweeping through my friends and across the world were the same thing, finally culminating in shock.
The reason was this: based on the limited glimpse that was my first impression, I had assumed that all of the people involved in the song were white.
This blunt realization of my own internalized default status of whiteness was a real bucket of cold water dumped over the head. I'd always felt that I was pretty well at peace with my racial identity, if not my national identity, over which I'd always been very defensive. "I'M NOT KOREAN. I'M AMERICAN. WHY WOULD I WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING KOREAN? STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER!!" Adopted from Korea at a young age -- four and a half months, to be exact, so no, I don't remember anything or anyone -- I grew up in a mostly white family (my mother's grandparents had emigrated from Armenia) in an overwhelmingly white rural/suburban community. At its most diverse point, my 500-student, second-through-fifth-grade elementary school had five non-white kids: me, another adopted Korean girl, one black kid, one Native American girl and a kid whose family had just moved from Japan for business. But my parents had been great, being upfront with me about my adoption, having lots of books, both educational and fun, on hand, and introducing me to Koreanness and the existence of other people like me with a week-long Korean culture camp in the summer that was never forced.
(And as easy as it is to make fun of Korean culture camp, I will never forget bringing the other Korean adoptee from my school, who had never been to such an event, to a visitor's day one summer. She was absolutely gobsmacked. She had literally never experienced simply seeing so many other people who just looked like her.)
And I'm not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg, but I'd apparently been self-aware of race from a very early age. My mom tells me of how, at some point too young for me to remember now, I was watching something on television, when all of sudden I pointed to the screen and declared, "People who look like me!"
Well, my mom said to herself, guess that means she knows she doesn't look like us.
Sure, some kids made fun of my eyes when we were in first grade. I might have threatened them to the point where they told the teacher and I got yelled at for it. But hey, let me tell you, they never bothered me about it from that point onward. And there was one cringe-worthy incident within my family, where my grandmother once scolded me for rubbing my nose too hard, which would "spread it." Deducing from this that a spread nose was bad, I would periodically stick a close-pin on my nose as a preventative measure. But I never said to myself, "I want to be white." I was pretty self-satisfied with my apparent well-adjustedness.
I don't really have any particular point that I'm driving toward with this. It was just an incident that has gotten me thinking. The experience of an adopted minority is a unique, quirky little beast. When your parents are part of that Othered identity, at least you have them to rebel against. I'm not them, you can tell yourself, look at the distance that I'm putting between myself and everything that they are. Now, I'm not saying that that's any field of roses -- there have been enough generational culture-clash books and movies and tragic news stories to that effect. But it's just a different situation when you are the only Other, the only Different. The only person that you have to distance yourself from in this case is yourself: I am not Me.
Over the summer, I'd had a Moment when, in the course of some conversation that I have otherwise forgotten, our Irish (as in, studying abroad from Ireland) artistic director noted how confusing it had been for her at first, coming to America and hearing people saying that they were Irish or Italian or what have you. When I'm back home, she said, and someone says that they're Italian, it means that they're from Italy, as in they themselves traveled from Italy to Ireland. It's not like it is in America.
Hearing that said aloud was like snapping that little metal disc in a super-saturated sodium acetate hand-warmer. It crystallized a realization and peace that I'd been approaching for the past few years now. All of my life-long angsting over my hyphenated national identity -- what it means to be Korean-American, Asian-American -- fell away.
I'm Korean. That's all. Just as I'm short and bespectacled and twenty-seven years old and atheist and a woman. And for all of that, I'm an American. Because that's what part of being an American is. If someone doesn't understand that, thinks that it means that I don't speak English or am forever straining against some overseas roots that are constantly pulling me "home," then that's their problem. I'm secure in who I am and to what I've chosen to belong.
Of course, with the new Red Dawn movie coming out, that might just mean that I'm a dirty yellow Red. (Does that make me orange?) Thank goodness that a bunch of wholesome white kids (plus Connor Cruise) are here to save us.
At the very least, I finally managed to defeat Gangam Style, which had been playing on repeat in my brain to the point where it was disrupting my sleep. Credit for this victory goes to Leonard Bernstein, whose On The Town I was studying for a class, with the "New York, New York" opening being strong enough to displace PSY. It couldn't have been more picturesque, either. I don't have classes on Tuesday this semester, and being currently not on production, I decided to go to New York because I could. I had a soon-to-be-expiring Bloomspot certificate for a badly-needed haircut, so there was simply nothing to be done but to get the hell out of Dodge.
In true autumn in New York fashion, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and everything was perfect. Riding the train into that, with the Columbia studio recording telling me what a wonderful town it was -- it's another time where I've needed to pinch myself to remind me that this is my life, not some movie that I'd magically woken up into.
I batted zero at getting rush tickets for Once, but that was okay. I picked up Groupon-discounted okonomiyaki for lunch. I met up with my friend P. as she was walking a client's dog, and then we went on a mad-cap chase through the West Village when we spotted a couple of small dogs that hadn't been leashed and were running loose through the streets. (Dashing across Bleecker Street, diving through holes in fences, in my stylish knee-high high-heeled boots, trendy skinny jeans, silk shirt and snappy vest? And I'm not living in a movie? What has my life become?) We finally herded the dogs back to their infuriatingly negligent owner and soothed ourselves with bubble tea and Japanese cheesecake before parting ways. I headed back to Midtown, browsed the fashion section in Kinokuniya and fell in love with the Jean Paul Gaultier Paris - Winter/Fall 2012-2013 look before getting my haircut. Fell in love some more while window shopping at Zara, then hung out in Sephora, using the store as my figurative fitting room for putting together future online orders. And then back, back home again.
As wonderful as that all was, I have to say, one of my biggest regrets from yesterday was that I naturally walk at a very fast pace. This meant that by the time the man harassing me on the street had moved on from general heckling (trying to get my attention as I walked in front of him in the way that one might speak to a dog -- "Hey. Heya. Hellohellohello." and some snapping -- which is very flattering, let me tell you) to the oh-so-intelligent-and-charming "Japanese? Chinese? Eh?", I was too far away (and swiftly moving farther) to be able to turn and shout in his face "AMURRKIN, MUTHAFUCKA," as any dignified (upstate) New York lady of grace and refinement would do.
More information on street harassment can be found on this website.
More information on Deadpool harassment, however, can be found in the enormous headache that I've developed over the course of this rainstorm.
