My Childhood Home

My childhood home was on a 1.4 acre lot, with a three-tiered backyard and a wooden swing my dad had built for me. The lower tier housed two dad-made greenhouses growing perilla leaves and red lettuce that I would pick before dinner to eat with our ssamgyupsal. The lawn would be mowed with a John Deere tractor paired with a trimmer, with both parents taking turns on each power tool. The kitchen pantry was stocked to the brim, and four fridges were required to feed the family: the kitchen fridge, the kimchi fridge, the garage fridge/freezer, and the fridge in the attached suite that was purely used to store fish products from Korea and frozen blueberries.

My mornings usually smelled of extra crispy bacon that my dad would not cook any less crispy, even after my repeated complaints, and Costco croissants. Always paired with tons of fruit and a salad or vegetables. And then my parents stopped worrying about me and started leaving the house before I woke up, therefore I would make myself eggs and instant coffee and maybe read a book. The instant coffee has followed me for 10 years.

I distinctly remember how my room would glow in the sun, the type of birds that woke me up, and the air, so crisp and fresh that, in hindsight, the act of walking out on the patio with my morning coffee probably cured me of several ailments that I’ll never know.

I remember clearing the kitchen counters to play table tennis with my sisters right after we had Korean barbecue on the patio. We would then all grab our evening coffees and go sit outside while we watched the sun set, swatting away the nasty forest mosquitoes.

I remember every summer my dad would borrow an industrial-grade attachment to the John Deere to dig up the moss accumulated from the winter months and the entire family, along with the sisters’ husbands, would rake the 1.4 acre lot to gather the excess. And then a family of bears would come and knock over our apple trees or deer would eat our tulip bulbs, and my parents would swear to sell the damn house soon. Mind you, they didn’t believe in hiring gardeners.

I remember dancing on the sofa while my sister played her 20th rendition of “Battle of Waterloo” on the piano and then joining her to play chopsticks in awful sync and tune.

I remember running up the curved stairs, only to slide down the wooden railings like it was a slanted firepole, which eventually led to a crack in the railing and lots of yelling, even though my parents thought it was endearing how we would use the staircase as a makeshift playground.

I remember biking around the front yard when I saw a bear coming down the hill, and I pedaled so fast back to the garage that I slammed into my dad’s 2008 Cadillac. But it was okay because we would then proceed to road trip all the way down to Arizona and Utah in that Cadillac, driving across deserts with a cigarette dangling from his hand every 30 minutes. He would warn me before rolling down the windows and then trashing the cigarette into a Mcdonald’s coffee cup in the cup holder. My dad has always been the perfect balance between traditional Korean and the American Free Market.

I remember how I moved into my sister’s room and spent years and years perfecting the decor, consisting of multiple trips to Ikea, constant reshuffling of furniture to find the perfect angle required for the sun to hit my pillows the way I saw on Tumblr, and how I ultimately moved back into my childhood bedroom while I was going through an awful breakup because I couldn’t bear to be in a room that wasn’t directly tied to innocence and safety.

I remember the first time I smoked in my home, out of a makeshift water bottle bong in my room at 3 am, dousing the entrance with Bath and Body Works spray to hide the smell. I remember the last time I did shrooms on the patio, only for my mom to come home early and find me a weeping mess on the lawn chair.

I remember all my firsts in this home, and hardly any of my lasts. I dream in this house, often in the kitchen or the foyer. Everything brings me back to my childhood home.

An Ode to the Movie Theater

Every Tuesday evening for the last 4 weeks, I’ve been at the movie theatres. Discounted Tuesdays have unexpectedly become a vital part of my August survival guide and anyone who knows me would be shocked to discover I now actively look forward to sitting still for a 2-hour-long emotional rollercoaster. Lately, the group chats have been all about spontaneous film suggestions and discourse, and I dare say it might be a newfound hobby of mine.

For context, my earliest memory of watching a movie dates back to when I was a child and my parents were watching Titanic on our TV late at night. I lingered behind the sofa, momentarily captured by the screen, only to be wracked with fear and anxiety when the ship started splitting in two. I have never finished that movie. 8-year-old me was terrified. The same went for nearly every single Disney movie ever because the villains were too much for me. I was 19 when I even came to know what the plot of The Lion King was.

Most of the movies I did watch growing up were on the airplane, usually by proxy of my parents' screens while some light-hearted comedy sitcom situation was playing mindlessly on mine. That’s how I watched Inception by the way, through the airplane screen, on a diagonal just like how Christopher Nolan intended.

I have always found movies to be daunting. Two plus hours of complete emotional investment that takes you through basically the entire trajectory of a life, condensed into a neat little intro, climax, and resolution. If you watch four movies in a day, you have witnessed four different universes, souls, lives, experiences, beginnings, and endings. Not because a movie literally takes you through consciousness, but the two hours you spend empathizing and immersing yourself in a fictional reality is the only glimpse you will ever have of that world, marking the life and death of that specific story. It’s the entire human (or alien) experience in one sitting and I frankly, do not have the emotional bandwidth to partake in that adventure much less stay alert in the one i’m actually living. And when I do watch a film or two, it’s either a) because I’m physically with someone who will be by my side for the entire duration or b) I'm sat at the theatres.

Recently, I’ve realized that this emotional pull is exactly why people become so passionate about movies - why some call themselves cinephiles. I’ve always been an emotional person: highly sensitive, quick to react, and capable of empathizing almost to a fault. Two-thirds through the toughest year of my life, and I finally find myself so desperate to escape my reality that the two hours of complete and utter emotional investment into a man-made world have now become my oasis in a torched desert. The volatile and delicate nature of my emotional and mental state has rendered me so porous to the affective power of movies that I will openly cry at any sign of hope portrayed during the film. And how can I not, when every beat, every nod, every twitch of the eye is timed perfectly to maximize the scene’s emotional intent. The walls of my neurons are so permeable that watching the end scene of Fantastic Four, where the flouncy, underestimated blonde girl finds a way to beat the big ol' bad guy, genuinely brought tears to my eyes.

I get it now, the feeling of being swept into a story that’s either so far from your own life it offers pure escape, or so close to your circumstances it reminds you you’re not the only one. And sometimes it’s something else entirely: the ideal, a world you can only dream of. For a couple of hours, you get to believe you’re there, that you’ve made it, that you’re right there with the character, that their wins are your wins, their losses are your losses, just long enough for the sun to set in real life and leaving the theatre feels like the entering of a new world. Like you truly escaped into an alternate dimension, like the real world genuinely ceased to exist.

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