Ghostly Matters -reflection

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Avery F. Gordon

http://www.amazon.com/Ghostly-Matters-Haunting-Sociological-Imagination/dp/081662089X

While I was reading Ghostly Matters, I was thinking of who my ghost(s) would be and what kind of social figure they are representing. My primary ghost would be my grandmother, who experienced the brutality of the Japanese colonial rule and lived her life as a colonial subject. She is representing the Japanese Colonialism, which was never vanished even after the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula officially ended in 1945, similarly to the Slavery in the United States as Gordon states that “the enslavement or domination that persists and that often masquerades as emancipation or freedom (187).” As a third generation ethnic Korean born and raised in the former colonial country, I have to admit the frightening level of internalization of the Japanese Colonialism and self-hate as a colonized. My dialogue with Grandmother started on the day she physically passed away and when her oldest son shared the stories about her, which I had never cared to know for the fifteen years I lived with her. I began to develop interests in documenting her story, a personal story and one of many stories of Koreans in Japan, who have been disappeared and told, “Since we disappeared you, you’re nothing. Anyway, nobody remembers you. You don’t exist (78).” Who told them so? The Japanese? It was not only the Japanese. It included us, who internalized and were practicing the Japanese Colonialism toward ourselves and our people. I needed to “recognize just where we are in this story, even if we do not want to be there (188)” and to confront myself being denial to myself and Grandmother –encounter.

As I dealt with the wolf in me and engaged in dialogues with Grandmother, a colonial subject, I started to realize that I myself am a subject of the Japanese Colonialism, that intends to perpetuate “the condition that produced disappearance (115).” When they started to “revise” history textbooks and deny the existence of the “comfort women,” their ultimate purpose was not to alter the understanding of the past, but rather to assert and perpetuate their Colonial ideology in the present through controlling the past, as Gordon describes that “it [history] is always a site of struggle” (184). When they are determined to disappear those who threaten the legitimacy of their ideology and to control the past as well as the present, it is our responsibility exerting the aptitude of ghosts to fight for changes, transformations, and justice.

Proudly, as part of the Final Fridays Films, and the 2009 Bay Area Zainichi Film Series, EastSide Arts Alliance & Eclipse Rising present...

HARUKO

Friday, January 30 at 7pm

at the EastSide Cultural Center

2277 International Blvd. at 23rd Ave., Oakland

510.533.6629

DELICIOUS REFRESHMENTS & COMMUNITY DISCUSSION
A free event

Haruko

a documentary film directed by Kazuyuki Nozaya, 2004

HARUKO is a spunky and high spirited 87-year old Zainichi Korean (Korean living in Japan) from Tokyo. This documentary, filmed by her son who worked for the pro-North Korea association of Zainichi called So-ren (chongryon in hangul) as a cameraman, includes footage collected as far back as 40 years ago. The film depicts the hardships and sacrifices a single mother endured in order to raise her eight children in Japan, a society with a long history of hostility toward Koreans in Japan, despite the end of Japanese colonial rule over Korea in 1945

Eclipse Rising is a US-based Zainichi Korean group founded in the winter of 2008, by seven Zainichi Korean women who came together in the Bay Area to recognize and celebrate the rich and unique history of Koreans in Japan, promote Zainichi community development, peace and reunification, and work for social justice for all minorities in Japan. This screening kicks off a quarterly Zainichi Film Festival produced by Eclipse Rising and screened at the EastSide Cultural Center.

Final Fridays Films of Resistance and Solidarity, a free monthly community event produced by EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA), screens on the last Friday of every month and is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. ESAA is dedicated to nurturing and supporting the work of the Lower San Antonio District's African American, Latino/ Chicano, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Indigenous artists and cultural workers, many of whom have not found a home within Oakland's mainstream arts community.

Final Fridays Films

• free community event •

wheelchair accessible

DIRECTIONS:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?formtype=address&address=2277+International+Blvd.&city=Oakland&state=CA&zipcode=94606
From BART, get off on Fruitvale BART and walk several blocks west on International Boulevard or walk 1 block north to International Boulevard and take 1R bus west to East Side Arts Alliance. For travel planner link, http://tripplanner.transit.511.org/mtc/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?#tab1Selected

Eastside Arts Alliance website: www.eastsideartsalliance.com

For questions about Eclipse Rising or to be on the list-serve for Eclipse Rising, please e-mail eclipserising@gmail.com

Please join our Facebook group or visit our blog at: eclipserising.blogspot.com

car & mental stability

i just finished the second week of winter quarter. though i was so reluctant to come back to la jolla and start a new quarter, i'm surprisingly doing pretty good so far.
i'm taking 3 courses: ethnic studies theory, cultural studies methodology and u.s. imperialism. there are 4-6 students in classes, which makes it so much easier for me to speak up in the class. i feel more comfortable since i don't have to feel like i have to prove myself to everyone else in the class. i can simply make comments or raise questions.
another, more important factor, that makes me more stable mentally is the car. i bought a car from a zainichi korean dealer last month and i've driven to l.a. twice already! having a car, thus having the freedom of mobility helps me to deal with la jolla shit, where no decent public transportation operates and no real "neighborhood" exists!
having controll over my own mobility is so significant especially when i'm already dealing with so many stressful things in my life. i can drive to the beach and relieve my stress whenever i want and i need! i can come visit my dear friends in irvine and claremont now. thinking about it is enough to make me happy :) my next drive to l.a. is next saturday. to celebrate my friend's 25th bday!!!!!

looking back last year

i'm copying several of my friends who have looked back their 2008 and anticipated their 2009!
2008 for me was full of changes!

january:
right after i celebrated new years with my halmoni & family in kyoto, japan, i went to seoul, south corea to learn the language and reconnect with my distant families there. the hasuk (boarding house) i found online while i was in japan was crappy. the bathroom was so nasty and barely had hot water...taking shower became the least pleasant thing to do in my life.

february:
i found a million times better hasuk at cheaper rate in hong dae area. i had to take a bus to yonsei korean language institute, but it was worth it. i could take off flip-flop when i took a shower and the shower kept its tempature for more than 15 min! ajumma (madam at hasuk) was so nice and she spoke japanese! i had all kinds of hasuk mates (singaporean, japanese, zainichi, british, canadian, american, chinese from korea...etc).
my parents and youngest brother visited me for the weekend. it was the first time for my brother to visit south corea and first time for my dad to be in seoul. we did lots of touristy stuff and had lots of GREAT korean food like sam gyeop sal!

march:
i completed the first quarter at yonsei. i did not understand anything on the first day of class, but i was able to understand the most of what our level 2 teacher was saying at the end of quarter. i felt so good!
i took a trip to chulla namdo (south chulla province) by myself (although my korean was still very very limited). as i was looking back my first few months in seoul, i was dissapointed at myself merely being a language school student, and not being able to get involved in any kind of political activities there due to my poor korean. i visited the organization that works for the reunification of the korean peninsula, but there was hardly anything i could do simply because my korean was sooooooooo bad. plus, i had not been able to reconnect with my relatives in seoul because i think i was not fully reconciled with the fact that they rejected letting me stay with them...

april:
starting the 2nd quarter at yonsei. yuko, chie, dean and miho came to visit me in seoul! it was such a fun week. before dean and miho arrived, yuko, chie and i went to visit pyong taek, where residents were forced to move because the us military was extending the base. yuko, chie and i were able to meet the person who's been involved in the grass-roots resistance against the us-south corean governments' brutality to deprive them of their dignity and livelihood.
yuko and chie are from okinawa and they had to do deal with us military and the japanese government messing up their life through colonization and militarization. i was kind of acting as an interpreter and thought of my unique positionality as zainichi when dealing with south corea & okinawa.
dean, miho and i went to DMZ. since i have a south corean passport and south corean civilians are not allowed to visit DMZ, i had to obtain a special document from the korean consulate in japan to prove my status as an overseas korean. when we arrived, the korean soldier (probably the one who is on the compulsary military service = 20 or 21 years old) got on our bus and started to check our documents. seems like he gave me a strange look when he was looking through my documents, but fortunately, i could stay on the bus with everyone else.
it was so weird to be on the south side of the DMZ. as soon as i stood on the ground of panmoon jum, i said to myself, "someday i will stand the other side of the DMZ"
the whole tour was very nationalistic and anti-north. we were forced to listen to the history from the south and most hilariously, we were forced to thank us soldiers for protecting us in the DMZ. i was like, "you guys are on our land. why the hell do i have to thank you for occupying our land!?"
in april, i realized that i was starting to mix japanese, english and korean almost unconsciously. i was able to write longer sentences and better text messages by the end of april.

may:
my halmoni and maternal families came. they went to kohyang (north kyung sang province) and came up to seoul. i couldn't come down to kohyang since i had school & work, but was able to spend the weekend with my families. then, i met my distant korean family and our relationship kind of started from there.
although it was the second time to meet them, it feld totally different since now i speak korean, even so little, and they felt they could communicate with me without having to ask my parents or halmoni to translate everything.
i was so happy that i could spend time with my halmoni. all my aunties & uncles were into sightseeing and shopping, which bothered me a bit because they appeared to be just like japanese tourists rather than being 2nd generation zainichi koreans who were educated in chun ryeon school from kindergarten to high school senior.

june:
i started to wonder what i was doing and felt lost while living in seoul, going to the language school, and teaching japanese. although my whole purpose of living in south corea was to reconnect with my distant relatives and to understand my halmoni (who passed away in 2000) better through learning the language and culture she grew up with, i felt like i wasn't successful in either goal.... until i visited her hometown with my family.
it was totally an amazing experience. just to be with my family was unbelievable. my older brother flew from tokyo, my parents and younger brothers from osaka and i flew from seoul. we all met in pusan international airport. my dad's counsins came to see us from the country side, where my grandparents were born and brought up (2.5 hours from pusan). we had a wonderful night as if we were trying to make up the time we had been separated. i see pictures from that night and everyone of us looks so happy. it didn't matter that my brothers barely spoke the language. we all found something that we didn't even know that we had and were deprived of. i was very honored to be able to serve as an interpreter for my brothers. my parents seemed vey proud of me. i was just hoping that none of us will never forget the night forever because this is clearly something that very few of zainichis could do and even care to do.

july:
i moved daegu for the summer internship. i worked as a research assistant at the economic research institute in daegu bank. the reason i took this opportunity was to live in the kyung san province where both sides of my grandparents came from. since seoul barely offered anything what i was looking for in terms of family connection, i had a majoe expectation in a summer in daegu. as soon as i arrived, i hear familiar accents. i was so delighted to hear the language my grandparents used to speak.
i picked up some dialects there which made me so happy because i knew i could say something that would surprise my halmoni! even though all my cousins went to chun ryeon schools and are fluent in corean, their corean is a "revolutionary language" influenced by the north which manifested the division of the peninsula and the tension between the north and the south.
i also took a trip to pusan to visit one of my dad's counsins. they took us around pusan and treated me like their own child. they were so patient with me and showed me lots of love. this was the first time i had an interaction with relatives in corea without my parents or halmoni. i was starting to build a personal relationship with them.

august:
went back to seoul for 10 days to meet everyone i wanted to thank to made my stay in corea so wonderful. it was so hard to say good bye to friends & families although it had not been too long since we had met. i didn't have any expectations in making such good friends in corea. my best friend was a corean from china. he was also the 3rd generation and we would discuss lots of different things in our broken corean over beer and soju. others also taught me so much about life. i left corea on august 7th. 7 months and 2 days of my life in corea.... was totally an accumulation of uncontable unforgettable moments.

september:
for a month with my parents, i tried to be the best daughter. i tried to get rid of some of the stuff that my parents need help with. i organized old pictures and albums of me and my brothers. i helped my mom with computer. my parents, older brother and i took a short trip to ohara (the north of kyoto) and visited the temple together. i thanked every day that i was able to spend time with my parents because i knew i was not gonna come home for a while.
my youngest brother went to DPRK with other zainichi students. i came back to the us a day after he came back to japan.
relocating to sd was hard. i didn't have anything. no internet...no bed... no light... no nothing. school was going to start in a week. 2 of my good friends came to help me move-in. i could never thank them enough for their help! seriously...drive 100 miles just to help me? i'm surrounded by so many good friends.

october - december:
school school school. no life outside of school
realized i could do nothing without a car in so cal. i found a zainichi car dealer, so i contacted him and bought a car from him. hopefully he will share his story as a zainichi in the us someday!
i had never felt so inferior in my life. i couldn't believe how behind i was and i thought i was admitted by a mistake or something. i felt like i was failing because i felt i should be doing much better that i was doing, looking at others with kids and so many other responsibilities.
i was intimidated by class readings and discussions as well. i was just hoping that this quarter would end soon. i knew exactly what my problems were. i was lacking theories and the ability to critically engage in readings. so, i decided to focus on learning how to read in the very first quarter. professors and other students were very supportive and encouraging. friends at different schools were also giving me lots of support and love. if it were not for them, i could never complete my first quarter at ucsd.

i went back to the bay area on 12/17 and spent my last days in 2008 with people i love, respect and care about. they make me feel at home, thousands miles away from my hometown. my goal in 2009 is to create a space that i feel at home in san diego. i'm detemined to stop comparing everything with the bay area and to make efforts to start liking san diego.

thoughts on kohyang 고향 (june, 2008)

i went to visit my halaboji & halmoni (grandpa & grandma)'s kohyang (hometown) with my parents and brothers this past week.
the trip was truly amazing for 2 significant meanings. one is to spend time with my family. all together for the first time in so many years since my brothers and I moved out long time ago and 2 of my brothers are now salarymen in Japan and hardly get any holidays. the last time I remember we managed to meet all together was at my cousin’s wedding last year, but for about 5 hours since my brothers had to go back to work right after the reception.
so, I was really excited about spending time with my parents and brothers for 3 days! It seemed almost impossible when my parents and I began planning the trip, but my salarymen brothers fortunately got days off from work and joined us in this amazing trip from Tokyo and Osaka.

the other was to visit my grandparents’ hometown.
since my grandpa had passed away before I was born (and even before my parents got married), my memory with 1st generation Zainichi Koreans is always associated with my grandma. I lived with her for about 15 years, but I was too young to understand why she was who she was. instead, my internalized racism against my own people made me see her as an old-fashioned uneducated Korean woman who I wished should have no connections with me.

it was not until I went to college and joined the Korean student organization when I learned about the history of Zainichi Koreans.
I learned how Koreans (were forced to) move to Japan during the colonial period and some of them ended up staying in Japan for one reason or another.

as for my grandma, right after the Korean peninsula was liberated from the Japanese rule, she started to devote herself in working for Chongryun (organization supported by DPRK), believing that the reunification will come any time soon. meanwhile, she also worked day and night to raise 6 children plus 1 niece who had lost her parents during the war.

although she never really talked about the hardship she had to go through verbally (partly because we did not have an universal language to communicate), I could still tell that she went through the tremendous difficulties by seeing her hands and her bent back.

since she was an active member of Chongryun and her first son was also working for the organization, she never had a chance to go back to her hometown, which was in a divided South. her parents (my great grandparents) also came to Japan during the colonial rule and lived in Kyoto (which I just found out about a week ago from my mom). Plus her brothers died in the Korean War. There seemed to be almost no reasons for her to go back to Korea. but I believed she wanted to go visit where she came from at least once before she died. who wouldn’t??? so, I decided. To bring her soul back. Back to where she was supposed to be. home coming after 50+ years. march 2004, 2 months after her death.
I wanted to send off her soul peacefully, so I didn’t tell anyone in my family and relatives that I was going. However, due to my limited knowledge of Korean and time there, I only managed to go to her hometown, but couldn’t identify the exact place she was from.

4 years later, I am in Seoul studying Korean. for 3 years in the states, where I found the pleasure in reading, writing, and thinking in English. I felt liberated in expressing myself in English, which de-colonized me from the way of thinking that the Japanese language had pressed on me.

my primary purpose of coming to Korea was to understand my halmoni deeper and thus feel closer to her through learning the language and culture that cultivated her. despite my expectation, the longer I lived in Seoul and the more I learned the kind of Korean taught in language schools, the farther I felt from my halmoni because she had probably never been to Seoul and she never spoke the Seoul dialect. My plan seemed to fail. I even regretted coming to Seoul. I thought I wasted the past 6 months.

Here comes the week of the family reunification and the visit to halaboji & halmoni’s kohyang. wow…what wonderful 3 days! my shitty level 3 Korean helped me communicate with relatives without having to ask for my parents’ help, which totally blew off my regret!
most importantly I was so happy that I was finally able to complete the unfinished business from 2004. it felt like that my halmoni actually brought me there, so I could feel free now. I could almost hear her saying “kweng cha na (it’s alright).”

보자기 pojagi: wrapping cloth

i got 보자기(pojagi) for my friend's wedding gift from 세로방 (serobang) in 인사동 (insa-dong).
http://www.konest.com/data/shop_mise_detail.html?no=1846

삼겹살 samgyupsal: three-layered pork

삼겹살 is one of my favorite koresn food. i had it in 2000 when i visited seoul for the first time in my life. i still remember how impressed i was! it's much cheaper than 불고기 (bulkogi) and still tasted as good, or maybe better. usually you roll it with veggies such as lettus or sesame leaves, but you can also roll it with a thin slice of 떡 (rice cake), which is called 떡쌈. the best 떡쌈 place i've been in seoul is probably 떡쌈시대 (www.ttokssam.co.kr) in 종로. average wait time is like 20-30 min, but it's totally worth it!