i’d think it’s pretty easy to make comparisons between satterwhite and leigh bowery, although i have not as yet heard anyone do so. and of course, because it’s constantly on my mind due to two and a half years of what we call “claudia goggles”, part of me wished she could have seen the performance too. there were other young kids there, and so we were almost sorry we hadn’t brought her, but shortly after the performance began a child behind us said, clearly, “i don’t want to watch this anymore.” this is nothing i would have wanted to expose a child to too early. and satterwhite isn’t going to get lost in the shuffle — i have a feeling that we will be boring claudia to death for years to come telling her about last night, saying, over and over again whenever we read of him somewhere, “we were THIS CLOSE to him!”

not only were we really close, but the headpiece with which he began his performance came off early in it, and was passed to an audience member. it then came down the line five or so people to ben, who attempted to continue passing it on, but no one else would have it. ben held it throughout the performance, giving us a new level of intimacy with it. i fingered the heavy beaded pieces, we played around with the helmet beneath the turban-like structure, and, we sniffed at the piece quite a bit. it had a female smell, and evoked satterwhite’s mother in a way that the audio and video used in his performance also does. (years ago, before kids, i had planned to bid on a leigh bowery head piece that had appeared on ebay, and all i was able to think when looking at the listing was “that is going to smell SO bad.”)

the performance was nothing less than amazing. jacolby satterwhite is amazing, and there’s a lot i won’t bother to say because i’m not an art critic, but my favorite moment was about a minute before the piece ended. this man, this very “perfect” physical specimen of a man, had been entirely naked in front of us for a good long time, and i suddenly saw something that under other circumstances would have been the FIRST thing i had noticed about him. and i said to ben and to the friend we were standing with, “oh my goodness, i didn’t notice that about his body until just now –” and they had no idea what i was talking about, because they hadn’t seen it at all. and that’s a damn good moment.

back to thinking about claudia in all of this. it seems so out of place to think about one’s two year-old daughter in connection with a really terrifying naked man covered in lamé and latex and paint. but, here’s where we come back to birthculture identity, and the fact that there’s no perfect manual for this, and that adoptive parents are transformed, overnight, into people who have to find a way to honor and expose — to generate — birthculture experiences for their children, without being part of that culture themselves, and without necessarily having any strong experiences or even feelings about that culture.

that’s why i say: go, unapologetically, with what you love. just find it, whether it is child-appropriate or not. how did we begin immersing ourselves in korean culture? it wasn’t sitting around playing that stupid game with the wooden sticks that our agency had us play — is there REALLY no other way to experience korean culture initially than to play yut? — we watched korean horror movies. we ate korean food. the things we liked, and could relate to, lead us to greater understanding, and put us in the position we are now in: to have people treat us as though it is some amazing coincidence that we love korean culture and then ended up with a korean son. we never said, “what is appropriate to teach a korean child about korea?” — because we would have been bored with that, and it would have showed, and b. would have seen us as parents who begrudgingly and without real interest dragged him around to fan dances and whatnot. i’m not saying the age-appropriate stuff didn’t find its way in — but it found it’s way in after we found our way in.

the african-american thing has been harder. we have been really open about that, or i hope we have. we are still feeling our way through it. we had our black daughter in our arms before we had ANY idea of how her birthculture would become part of, or affect, our lives. as an american, she came with no “foreign” language for us to study. one does the natural things, again — one tends to look to food and entertainment (if one is me, or ben.) and god knows we are thrilled to have dj lance rock, but i’m equally thrilled to have jacolby satterwhite. these are baby steps but they are real steps, not fake ones.

also at jolie laide works by robert horvath. they were cool.

the night before, the gallery had hosted a number of events including a “yarnbombing” — and as a knitter, i found this kind of thing boring when it began, and years later it’s not any more interesting. but we had a great night.

short video clip of jacolby satterwhite’s performance at jolie laide

every day i thank the heavens that we waited long enough to have our kids to be out of the barney years, the teletubbies years, and that we have been given the gift of GABBA. what a stupendous children’s program. not only do we love it and the kids love it, but it has given ben and me our own new “grown up” music favorite (of montréal). how excited were we to get tickets to the live show? VERY.
please peruse our other photos from the great event.

look at the alley manager’s face. he’s a really nice guy but he knows what’s coming. why didn’t we?

it was all fascinating, and maybe a little scary. some dolls look friendlier than others.
claudia though this Big Boy doll looked a lot like baby satchel, whom she had met earlier in the week.

my favorite was the cream of wheat man doll… and the flip wilson doll, which i did not get a good photo of. there were also many old handmade and primitive dolls that i would like to get a look at again – i think we will visit often!

miss barbara could not have been nicer to us! she was very attentive. we will enjoy stopping at the doll museum on our way for korean food regularly, and claudia has already discussed bringing some of her own dolls to show to miss barbara.

one day this past week, the new york times had an article about families hiring nannies to do double-duty as second language instructors. i was pretty turned off by it — particularly by the parents in the article, who have hired a nanny to speak spanish with their child, but are not learning spanish themselves because it’s “harder” to learn a language when you are “older”. their solution? keep the nanny on, even after the kid goes to school. “There’s a financial implication to that,” the father is quoted as saying, “but we don’t want (our son) to lose (his Spanish).”

while the article went on to quote studies that indicate that kids have somewhat reduced vocabulary capacity in each of their spoken languages when bilingual (when compared to children who only speak one language), the article certainly glossed over what can be gained at the cost of that slightly lower vocabulary capacity — like, say, the ability to talk to many people one would otherwise never get to talk to.

i suppose we had it “easy” in “choosing” korean to be our household’s second language. but ben and i also committed to learning it ourselves. we chose to learn korean because we expected to have a korean child. we knew that if he were to ever have a conversation, face to face with his own birthmother, that he would likely have to do it in korean. we had no desire to isolate béla as the only person in the household who “needed” to know korean. we do plan to travel there, we enjoy korean films, we know korean people. these are good reasons to learn a language. we are not too old to do it, and we imagine that it is meaningful to our children to see us learning along with them — and, reading to them in korean.

maybe we do all want “better” for our kids than we had in our own childhoods, but hell, that does not mean i’m going to shortchange myself. i want to learn korean too!

ben brought home a little tear-off tab from a flyer last night when he came back from walking the dogs. it was for spanish, french and mandarin “immersion” classes for two to ten year olds in philly. from what i could tell from looking at it, a local philly district teacher had bought a franchise and would be providing either one to two 45-minute classes a week, using stories, songs, etc.

we do that here, at home, for free, with our korean. i AM glad, though, to see that mandarin is being taken seriously. if my kids end up at a school with a language immersion program, i know we are not going to get korean, but i’d take mandarin (as it helps one with one’s korean). i do find it amusing to tell people that i believe it’s necessary for our childrens generation to be able to communicate with their chinese overlords… but if i have found one thing, it’s that parents of young children are as lacking in humor as your average lesbian or feminist. bada-bing!

anyway, i was very happy this week to find books by one of the kids’ favorite authors — todd parr — in korean. it was my biggest impulse purchase in some time, and i will be busy this weekend copying the texts out in korean as audio requests on rhinospike, and doing english translations of them so i can get to reading them to the kids. as soon as they saw the books, they recognized the design and illustrations, and claudia began “reading” one, from memory, being familiar with parr’s english-language books.

here are a series of three knitted balaclava which represent characters from the korean — specifically the yangju — mask dance. “mask” in korean is 탈 (tal) — hence my pun. (i was going to make a fourth, based on a character who really reminded me of marcel proust, but when it came down to it, it just didn’t have anything about it that was that different from the others, and i decided not to.)

i’ve gotten very interested in the korean mask dance, and knitting these has been a way to “work through” my interest. because i love looking at the masks, i also began — because there wasn’t one — a korean mask and masked dance group on flickr, giving me access to many amazing masks and interpretations of masks, as well as videos of the dance performances!

there’s a lot going in with these masked dances. there are far more than one set of masks — different geographical areas have different masks, and sometimes different characters (although there are some overlaps in characters and certainly in general archetypes for characters). i chose the yangju masks just because of their particular style and look, and what i considered their knitability. google searches for images of these characters by their names — 연잎, 미얄할미, 왜장녀 — show how different the masks themselves are.

these images how the masks look when treated as masks of this type might often be — hung for display on the wall. but when worn by people, knitted masks do something different than what traditional wood or gourd masks do. knitted masks start taking on the characteristics of the human faces under them, and it’s pretty freaky to see. i’m taking some time, though, to audition faces and heads of people i know, to get a picture of all three masks being worn.

this week roberta fallon and libby rosof’s artblog radio featured jong kyu kim. my husband says i should lay claim to having “scooped” them on jong kyu, as i wrote a feature piece about him a few months ago for the summer 2010 korean quarterly, but artblog had covered his me & you, keanu performance right about the time i stumbled upon his work, when he was in the choir for george ferrandi’s wherever there is water procession.

i was going to mention the piece here anyway, because of its significance as my last feature for KQ for the known future. i will be finishing up my column, creation myth, there as well, in the next two to three issues. we are calling this a “hiatus” for me at KQ, and i have plans to come back at some point with older, more sentient children about whom i can write a column that contains a lot more cursing than the first incarnation. but, in an effort to really use my new childfree hours to focus on fiction, i will be taking an indefinite break from KQ. i am very grateful for my experience there, as it helped me make a few very good friends, introduced me to some of my heroes — literally, heroes — of both literature and textile art, and all with only a minimum side-helping of whiny self-obsessed lunatics.

in recent months — out at korean culture events, and sometimes at home on my computer, i have been really surprised — shocked, even — to realize how many people have been reading my stuff in KQ and who have approached me to say, “oh, it’s YOU!”… it’s nice. thank you, people.

do check in though with jong kyu. i have a feeling that perhaps even a few decades from now, critics may be hailing him as “a cutie”, and indeed, he is a great big cutie. but his work is very thoughtful, and he is sharp. so being a cutie is probably just one incisive little tool in his toolbelt.

also enjoy: no one is leaving, a dance performance by jong kyu and our friend “jonanna” quigley, with music by david lackner (who is also claudia and béla’s music teacher).

most pivotal i think is her recent “understanding” of the word “english”. she now gets, to some extent, that “english” is what we speak in the default. she is, however, trying to line it up with the intuitive relationship between the words “korea” (“béla was born in korea…”) “korean” as race (“béla has delicious korean toes”) and the speaking of the “korean” language.

even before she got “english” or “korean”, she had isolated “speaking” as the word that meant “another language”. after all, we “talk,” and we say we are “talking”, but when we or anyone is doing it in something OTHER than english, we say they are “speaking” that language. at dance camp in june, she heard kun-yang lin speaking chinese, and we discussed it. later that day (and week, in fact), she reminded me many times that kun-yang had been “speaking”. she forgot the “chinese” part, but it was clear to what she was referring.

then, she began to recognize korean words as the thing we called “korean”, but she also knew that BELA was a “thing” we called “korean”. since she knew HE was korean and SHE was black, she chose, for awhile, to express the act of speaking korean language in THOSE terms — when b. did it, it was “korean”. when she did it, it was “speaking black”. she’s still looking, i think, for the quid pro quo terms for her own situation. “black” is what she “is”, but so far there’s no special place, or special language, that goes with it, and she seems to know it.

i was surprised to find her helen-keller-at-the-well moment was with the word english. she had just finished some semblance of counting to five in pure korean numbers (leaving out four/넷 and adding six/여섯, which she still calls “yo-yo”), and i said, “great, now let’s do it in english.” she looked at me doubtfully, but as soon as i started to count, the light went on. “english!” she said.

and once our primary language — her birth language — had a name, she was much more effective at distinguishing it from words that were in korean. almost immediately, saying things like “it’s milk in english, 우유 in korean,” made sense to her — not that she would always remember the korean word, but suddenly, i saw that she understood the concept behind it.

this morning, in her usual fashion. she donned an arbitrary selection of dress-up items, put “sunblock” on her babies and made them a “school lunch,” pushed a shopping cart to the door, and said, “goodbye!” — but whereas she usually says she is going to “target”, “acme,” or “ikea,” she said, “i going english!”

and now, a song about carrots.

and, a kickass song by 자우림. it’s this korean, edith piaf, grudge-match kinda thing, and the kids like it too!

the kids immediately recognized kyung’s voice, as she had sung the song to them just the day before. claudia, once reminded that 곰 was “bear”, sang the entire tune substituting the word “bear” for every syllable. then, she started singing it in phonetic korean. then, so did béla. and this week, when audrey and kyung came to visit, we all sung it together. just like that!

there are many versions of 곰 세마리 on youtube. the kids like this cartoon one (claudia said, of the bears’ stiff movements, “they move like chuck e. cheese”), and i like this “hardlock version”.

(the kids seemed mildly horrified by that one, and also had the same reaction to two black teenage girls singing the song phonetically and not nearly as well as b. and c. do.)

another korea mom sent me the url to all japanese all the time, which — while having nothing to do with korean — is the very energetic and inspiring blog of a young man (i believe from kenya) who learned to speak fluent japanese, without textbooks, without classes. immersion is key. having fun is key. nobody’s too old or too young — i like how this guy thinks.

and i remain proud of my progress using the lessons on talk to me in korean.com — so proud that i needed to save this praise from 현우씨:

happy gotcha day to béla changsu, our son. he has celebrated so far with his own bag of shrimp crackers (from kyung and audrey), and with the gift that keeps on giving — a kwaenggwari. what were we THINKING?!

oh well — off to sesame place!