dreams

so i'm thinking of starting a program in Richmond for APA youth... scary... i'll be satisfied if i can start small (like 5-8 youth)... i have some ideas, am still thinking about how this can work, need to talk to the youth... so scary... if you're available to bounce ideas around or want are in the east bay and may want to help (ahem... cynthia?) lemme know. if this gets off the ground, i'll prolly start a separate blog to document the process. YIKEs!!

Yuhl-Sheem (6)

After the first Gulf War, the economy went bad. A lot of our customers ended up getting laid off and had to move to other states. We also had contracts with big companies and hotels and a lot of these businesses had gone under. So after a couple of years fifty percent of our customers had moved away. It was hard-- we had payments to make.

That year was very difficult for our whole family. Christen had started high school and we had enrolled her in a school that was out of our district. We had read in the newspaper that many students from a particular high school graduated and went to an Ivy League or another top school. It was the best public school in San Diego County. Because it was so far away James would have to drive Christen to school before he came to the cleaners and pick her up after our store closed. She would spend an hour in the library before school started and three hours after school ended. We wanted to give our girls everything we never had but it was getting harder and harder to do so.

As our business got smaller I had more stress. We had so many payments to make: $2,400 in house payments, $2,500 in payments to the elder from our church whose business we had bought, and $3,000 in rent payments for our cleaners. It was too much. For almost a year, after all our payments were made we still had $5,000 a month. In the end, after five years of business, we couldn’t even make our payments. We were in debt. Even when our business was good we hadn't been extravagant with our money. We had bought a house, but had never owned a new car or bought anything with a designer label. Even our furniture was old. All the money we had saved had gone to make back payments.

In the end we decided not to sell the business. We just left it. We didn’t want to sell it to anybody because it was failing. A broker had a person who wanted to buy our business but we didn’t want anyone else to suffer like we did so we just closed our doors. We also helped Lola and Margarita find new jobs; we didn't want them to suffer either. We couldn’t meet the mortgages on our house so we had to file for bankruptcy. I cried so much then. Since I was born, that’s the time when I cried the most. My mah-uhm was broken. I cried every night, all night long. We had back payments on the mortgage and the property taxes. We couldn’t sell our house either because of the economy. So the bank repossessed our home.

After we went bankrupt we moved out of our house and back into an apartment. It was so little and cramped compared to our house. It was hard to live at first. Nobody in our house worked for about a year or two. We had property in Korea that we had inherited and sold so we used that money and also borrowed some money to live. I didn't work for many years. I had so much stress from the dry cleaners and the bankruptcy that I couldn't work. I had no heart to work. I just wanted to stay home. I was so sad then.

Even though I didn't want to work or leave the apartment I hated being in the apartment. I felt trapped. It was so cramped compared to our house. We had given away a lot of our material things that we didn't have room for like our barbeque, our daughters' bikes, and some of our furniture but we still had a lot of things. It was all crammed into a two -bedroom apartment. The tiny balcony in our apartment that replaced our backyard was overflowing with plants and flowers. There wasn't enough sunlight coming in. My plants were overcrowded so some of them started to die. In the end I had to give many of them away.

dental torture

normally i'm very good at the dentist. like many children of immigrant entreprueners we did not have health/ dental insurance for a very long time. in fact, the first time i really remember going to the dentist was in 10th grade! so many years of never visiting the dentist resulted in a root canal on my first visit. :( depsite this, i enjoy going to get my teeth cleaned. it's kind of refreshing. today's appointment was totally different.

let me start off by saying i really don't like my dentist. you can tell that he thinks he's very good looking and that his work is extremely important, like life changing. he lectures me constantly about the importance of flossing, tells me everything about anything related to teeth, and thinks he's so pro that he knows my dental history w/out looking at my chart. "i see you had braces." "no i didn't." "of course you did." "no, really i didn't." "are you sure? lemme check your file." wtf? OF COURSE i would know if i had braces. goodness.

what is most irritating is that when he cleans my teeth he loves to say soothing things like, "you're doing GREAT!" or "see that wasn't so scary?" as if i was a little kid wimpering in my chair! i am totally chill at the dentist. i breathe normally and certainly don't tense up. the only problem i have is i hate the grittyness after the cleaning and they only give me a tiny bit of water to rinse. that is seriously the most dramatic thing about my dentist visits.

today, different story. i don't know what happened but i freaked out in the chair as soon as the first high-pitched tool turned on. i scrunched up my eyes, curled my lips, and gripped the arm rests. the noise was horrible! i was really scared. i did everything i could to calm myself down but nothing worked. 5 minutes into my cleaning, my neck and shoulders were aching because i was so tense. 7 minutes into my cleaning i almost started crying because the noise was so irritating. plus it hurt!

in the end i made it. i endured and my teeth are nice, smooth, and plaque free! silly how i'm so proud of myself!

Yuhl-Sheem (5)

I worked at Horton Plaza for about a year and I didn’t work again until James and I decided to start our own business. This was in 1988. We didn't have very much money saved up so we borrowed money from my father-in-law and some other people. We wanted to open up a restaurant inside of a food court at first but we couldn’t because restaurants are open on Sundays. My father-in-law told us that we shouldn’t do that because the Bible says to rest on Sundays. So we thought about that and realized that most dry cleaners are closed on Sundays so we decided to do that.
There was an elder at our church who owned two dry cleaners. He was about to retire so he sold the cleaners to us. It was a mistake to buy it.

At first we made a lot of money. After just a few years we had enough money to put a down payment on a house. It was a big house in a new area. It was safe and spacious. We did the landscaping ourselves. I planted trees, plants, and flowers all over our front yard and backyard. I had always wanted a large backyard to grow my plants. There, they had a lot of space to grow. It was nice to own something and not have to pay rent.

We each worked about 90 hours a week and never took a vacation; our only breaks were on Sundays. We worked so hard that we never got to see our daughters. We would leave early in the morning around 5 or 6 a.m. before they were up and come home after they went to bed, around 10 or 11 p.m.

The girls would ride the bus home from school and take care of themselves until bedtime. It’s so sad. They would make their lunch to take to school. They didn’t have time to make sandwiches in the morning so they would just take a bag of chips and a juice box. When they would come home they would make ramen or sandwiches. I eventually taught the girls how to make soo jeh bee, a simple Korean soup that I made for my brothers and sisters when I was a girl in Korea. Christen and Amy would sit in front of the TV and knead the flour for the soup at the same time. I didn’t want my girls to cook too much because I grew up taking care of my brothers and sister at such a young age. I didn’t want them to cook or clean like I did when I was a little girl. Amy was in fourth grade then and still very little. She had to pull herself on top of the counter so she could reach the stove and the microwave. One time she tried to cook and her hair caught on fire!
The long hours we put in at work got to be too much for our family. My husband said that we needed to spend more time with our daughters, even if it was only eating dinner together. So after our store closed at night, James would drive home, pick up our daughters and bring them back to the cleaners. The four of us would eat out as a family. Sometimes we would eat at this fancy Chinese restaurant called Chin’s but mainly we ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken or got Mexican food. After dinner our family would come back to the cleaners. My daughters would work on their homework or read and they'd help us with our work. We spread out sleeping bags on the counters and floors so they could sleep if we stayed there late.

When Christen and Amy were younger, on the weekends or their school vacation they'd come to work with us, or we would drop them off at a library near our work and they would stay there and read books for the entire day. They never complained. After Christen was in sixth grade she would run the small agent store for us. Amy would play in the back and keep her sister company. It was just those two little girls at a store all by themselves. These are sad memories for me but my daughters say they talk of those times with happiness.

At that time I had a lot of stress. My English wasn’t perfect so it was challenging for me to talk to the customers. Sometimes they would complain and I couldn’t explain everything in English. It was hard. I would think, “We started this business for nothing. It was a mistake.” Also some customers would accuse us of ruining their clothes and they would sue us. We would clean something according to the label but the clothes would get ruined. It wasn’t our fault; it was the manufacturer’s fault. Still sometimes we had to pay $300 for one piece of clothing. They would yell at me and tell me to go back to my own country. I always thought that having another business wouldn’t be so stressful.

Even though it was hard to run the cleaners, there were good times too. Some of our customers were so good to me. The elderly customers would tell me how sweet I was. They liked how I smiled a lot. They would say, “Song, you're such a nice girl.” Some of the customers would give us gifts on Christmas and always speak very kindly to us. Sometimes the men would ask me to go golfing with them or go on a date! I would have to tell them I was married and had two daughters. The men would be shocked and embarrassed.

Aside from the nice customers we had two employees, Lola and Margarita who helped make our time at the cleaners less stressful. They didn't speak very much English so they would teach us Spanish words and we'd speak to each other broken English. All of us would laugh at the way we sounded. They were good employees. My husband and I believe you have to treat your employees well so they feel that it is their business too. They worked so hard. All day long, sweat would drip from their foreheads and I would think, they are such good people—they work that hard only for their children. I had a lot of respect for them.

The Book Meme

1. One book that changed your life. Strangers from a Different Shore by Ron Takaki

The first Asian American Studies class I took was a reading and composition class. This class made me branch out into other Asian Am classes the following semester. Reading Strangers in Asian Am 20a was pretty much what decided my want to major in AsianAm. This book helped me find my place and face in U.S. history. Additionally, Takaki's humble approach to life and writing makes this book even more fascinating.


2. One book you have read more than once. The Outsiders by SE Hinton
I first fell in love with this book in sixth grade. I have the same tattered and loved copy on my bookshelf. "Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold"







3. One book you would want on a desert island. The Bible

If I had the Bible w/ me on a desert island, i'm pretty sure i'd read it in it's entirety, something I have yet to do.








4. One book that made you laugh. Same Difference and other Small Stories by Derek Kirk Kim

Derek Kirk Kim is an amazingly talent artist and storyteller. Check out his website and click on comics to read some of his work.







5. One book that made you cry. Blu's Hanging by Lois Ann Yamanaka
Despite the controversy that surrounds this book, it is one of my favorite books of all time. We were supposed to read it for Asian Am Lit. Almost all the women in my class (including me) admitted we cried when Blu gave Ivah maxi pads for Christmas. *sigh*









6. One book you wish had been written.
I don't understand this one... I'm changing it to One book you wish you had written: Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
I have so much admiration for bell hooks' writing. this is a book to turn to when my work with students becomes tiresome or difficult








7. One book you wish had never been written. i can't think of any... sorry!!


8. One book you are currently reading. In AP US History, Mr Evans supplemented the textbook w/ A People's History. I was too young and stupid to really appreciate it at the time. Good thing I've grown up since then! The Reader is a collection of his publishings. I love people who write in a way that is accessible to everyday people.






9. One book you have been meaning to read. too many to list. i'm always looking for good fiction (despite what most of my meme looks like)

10. I tag Gar, Marie, Alphonsis, and Tiff

Yuhl-Sheem (4)

One day I turned on the TV and what I saw gave me hope. There was that show with the puppets-- Sesame Street. When I saw that show, I felt like education in America was so accessible. It's like it was being given away for free. By that time I had two young daughters-- Amy was born in 1982. I knew that both of my daughters would be able to be successful in a country that let everybody learn. That is one of the only things that I had hoped for that came true since I lived in America. My daughters are successful. It makes me so happy to think of them because they have what I couldn't have.

When I was a little girl in Korea, our family was so poor. My sister and I had to quit school to find jobs and make money to get ready for our immigration to America. We had to make money for airplane tickets, documents, and things like that. After we came to Guam I wanted to start high school but the school officials told me I was too old. So when I think of my daughters, it's like a dream.

I started working after a couple of years of living on the mainland. Amy, was only about three years old and Christen was five years old when I started to work. James would come back from work and we would have dinner and put our daughters to bed. We would go to downtown San Diego to the Horton Plaza mall and clean up the movie theaters there. We would leave at 9 or 10 p.m. and come back sometimes 2:30 a.m.-- on the weekends we finished around 4 a.m. We would come home and Amy would be sleeping but Christen would just be sitting up in bed, with her eyes wide open, not crying or anything but just waiting for us. It's illegal to leave your kids home alone! If they had cried and the neighbors called the police they would take our kids way. We would have had to get a lawyer. But we didn’t know that. We couldn’t help it. If we had known it was illegal we wouldn’t have done it. That was my first job in the mainland. Together, James and I made about $1,500 a month. We didn’t get paid by the hour. It was contract work. We worked there for about two years. Now, when my family and I go to Horton Plaza to shop or eat at Claudia's Famous Cinnamon Rolls, I can't believe how far I've come. Even though we worked there until the very early morning, I never regretted coming to America. I could ask myself that 10 times or 100 times and I always think that it was a good choice to come here.

At that time James also had a job doing maintenance work at the Holiday Inn. After we had been in San Diego for about three months he looked in the American papers for jobs. It makes me laugh to think about him going to a job interview and not knowing very much English. When he told me he got the job I didn’t believe him. But he did get the job! When I think of my husband finding jobs with just a little bit of English I think it must be God’s blessing. The man who hired my husband must have a kind heart. Even in Guam when James first came to America he found work at the Hilton Hotel. He says he could survive anywhere, even in Africa. I ask him, “How could you survive in Africa?” And he says it is because God protects and takes care of our family. He is right.

It was around the time that my second daughter was born that my faith in God had started to grow. When I was little girl in Korea I would go to Sunday school every week. Sometimes my brothers or sister would come along, but my parents never came to church. I would go every Sunday because I loved hearing Bible stories, drawing pictures, and singing songs like Jesus Loves Me. Even though I went almost every week, I didn’t know God. It was just a place for me to go and be a child. There, I didn’t have to worry about taking care of my brothers and sister, finding food, or carrying heavy loads of dirty clothes to the river. I could go to Sunday school and have fun and have no responsibilities. Even when I was a young woman in Guam, I went to church every week to listen to the choir. I still didn’t have faith in God, but I loved listening to the beautiful voices of the choir. It wasn’t until after I married James that I became a true Christian.

For me, when I first came to San Diego I thought, “I have to find a Korean church.” In America, Korean churches have a lot of members who weren’t Christians when they first started coming to church. They’re new immigrants who need to be with other Koreans. They have to go to a Korean church because that’s the only place where they can see other Koreans, make friends, and hear about the news. After they start going to church I think a lot of them start to have faith in God.
For my husband and me it was different. When we started to go to church in San Diego, for us it wasn’t about making friends. We just wanted to go to a Korean church so we could worship God. We went to a Korean church because we wouldn’t be able to understand anything at an American church.

Magnetic North

i've been meaning to post this since june.

my friend freida k. got me hooked on hip hop duo Magentic North. i've been listening to their album non-stop since i got in (that is until ben jacked it... don't worry, MN, he's just borrowing it until his own copy arrives!). their sound, lyrics, and delivery are beautiful and complex, plus their DJ has bombass voice. my favorite song is called "drift away". listen to it on their myspace or buy their album on their website

resolution

i'm not one for new year's resolutions, but in light of all the happenings in my life (too many to name), i'm making an August resolution.

I resolve to keep my mind, body, and labor from being exploited by people (including myself)/ institutions that i love and hate.

"i'm not a rock; i'm just a pebble. "

so far, i have no action plan. but seriously, if you see me yielding too much to people, slap me hard.

Yuhl-Sheem (3)

Since I was a young girl I dreamed of going to America. As I grew older I was surrounded with tantalizing tokens of America. Sometimes our family would get food supplies from the United States. I loved the food—things like Spam and that powdered drink mix—Tang—it was like nothing I had ever eaten. Such ingenuity! I would watch movies and see the convertibles and beautiful scenery and I thought that all of America was that lucky. America seemed so beautiful.

When I was almost 20 years old, my family finally got the chance to leave Korea. We first went to Guam and lived there for about three years. Soon after I arrived in Guam my uncle showed me a picture of James. James was a young man who was looking to come to the U.S. on a work visa. Our families had a mutual friend who was trying to set us up. I looked at his picture and thought that he looked like a nice man but I was not attracted to him. I had no want to get married. Eventually, James came to Guam. He was a very kind man. I could tell from the way he spoke to others and the way he spoke to me. Despite this, I still didn’t want to get married. I wanted to go to school or find a job and become a career woman. I had big dreams; I came to America to make those big dreams come true. Even though I didn’t love him my parents had arranged my marriage so I had no choice. We were married in December of 1978, only after five months of knowing each other. At that time a part of me resented him. I wanted to be free. It wasn’t until five years after we were married that I grew to love my husband. It wasn’t until much later that I became grateful and glad to have him as my husband.

In December 1979 my first daughter, Christen, was born. Two years later we were able to go to the mainland. When we were flying to the mainland I felt like I was truly going to America. To me, Guam wasn’t a real part of America. I wanted to go the mainland. I was so excited.

One of my brothers picked James, Christen, and me up at the LA airport. As we drove home to San Diego I kept staring at the open roads. They were so spacious; it felt so free. We stopped at a rest stop to use the bathroom and I was amazed at how clean and nice the bathrooms were. America truly was like the movies! Riding on those huge roads made me happy. I had no fear at all. Even though I couldn’t speak any English, I didn’t care. My mother and father were already in San Diego; my entire family was already here. I wasn’t scared at all. I just kept thinking about how I was going to see my family. I never wondered what would happen to me because I couldn’t speak English.

Yuhl Sheem (2)

This is part of an oral history project I did when I was an undergrad. It is written in my mother's voice.

The day that I was born will never be known. My American documents say I was born on October 16, 1956. My mother told me I was born in 1955. I think I was born in 1953 or 1954. All I know is that I came out of my mother’s body soon after the end of the Korean War. We were a poor family. I remember a lot of the time there wasn't enough food so my mother wouldn't eat. I would try to give her food from my rice bowl but she would say she wasn't hungry. My family wasn’t concerned with recording or remembering dates. They had no big hopes or dreams for me; they were concerned with finding food for our next meal.
Even though we were a poor family, all six of the children still celebrated their baek-il, the Korean celebration of a baby's 100th day. It is an extravagant celebration with lots of good food and family. At the baek-il, three items are put in front of the baby: paper money for wealth, a pencil for intelligence, and a piece of string for long life. Whichever the baby grabs is a sign of its future. I am told I grabbed all three.

Yuhl-Sheem (1)

Lately my life has been swamped with some very personal responsibilities, resulting in my blog remaining loveless. Sorry blog.

In an attempt to maintain my blog, share some of myself with my readers, and try and become re-inspired to write some shit that has been stewing in my mind for the past few years, I’ve decided to post an oral history I wrote in college. This was a very personal project for me because it was on my mother and because one of my mentors worked very closely with me on it.


Yuhl Sheem- Introduction
The post-1965 wave of Korean immigrants are generally characterized as a college-educated and middle-class group. The American media's representation of the Korean population in this country consistently ignores the complex socioeconomic makeup of that population by defining the whole after looking at a select, economically prosperous portion of that population. New York magazine called Koreans New York City’s “super immigrants” and “most productive community”. The article cites that seven hundred Korean-owned businesses opened in 1994, but failed to mention that another nine hundred closed down. Ironically, the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising rendered these “super immigrants” as deserving of the punishment they suffered. When Koreans in America are a “model minority,” they are entrepreneurial and educated; when they are “foreigners”, they are clannish and selfish.
This paper is based on an oral history of my mother. My mother never finished high school and is a working class woman who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s. She is neither a model minority nor is she a cliquish woman. She lives on the outskirts of an English-speaking society and sits apart from her middle class Korean immigrant counterparts. This paper explores how she lives her life in America as a woman who lives in a peripheral space of a marginalized group.

Dirty Water

i've been meaning to post this link for awhile. it's a fascinating series on how our oceans are changing due to pollution. i don't really consider myself an environmentalist but this did cause me to make some small changes in my life and write a letter of appreciation to a few corporations who have made some environmentally-friendly changes.

Righteous Bastard

today i was in a store when I overheard this woman ask a store worker where she could find a particular item. The worker, a Latino man, said "Go to the pharmacy" in an accented voice. The woman starts working toward the pharmacy (and behind me)and mutters "Get some fucking English under your belt!" *sigh* I turned around and gave her this incredulous look. She stared back at me puzzled. My mind was buzzing. i was so disgusted by her xenophobic words. my stomach was churning. i thought about my parents and all the people that remind me of my parents. i seriously wanted to throw up... I had so much I wanted to say to her, so much that i couldn't straighten out my thoughts. i couldn't get anything out of my mouth except, "Well, maybe you should move out of California." Right. It was neither the most articulate or even pointed statement I could have made, but it was what came out of my mouth*. Anyway, her response was, "I've lived in California my entire life!" Then she quickly scurried away.

I was in fucking OAKLAND. I was so pissed off. I tried to continue my shopping but was so angry that i almost started crying in the store.

anyway, 6 hours later i'm still thinking about this fucking woman and my stupid ass response. what do you do in that angry moment? what can you really say? i know i could have said something far more clever or thought provoking than " Maybe you should move out of California" but even then, what would i have achieved? there is nothing i could have said in the passing moment to make that woman rethink her racist comment. what's the point in even saying something in that situation?


________
*admittedly, a part of me was trying to gauge if this woman would try and start a physical fight with me or would just use words. she was kinda big. i'm kinda small.