The Last Waltz

Alan loved Korean cinema. Uncle Steve had given me and Mom books on Korean films years earlier, but for Alan, the interest grew in the last few years. He took a course on violence in Korean film, and was excited to be in this class because the professor had an interest in phenomenology.  There was a focus on the movies of Park Chan-wook.

 
I had wanted to see Snowpiercer with him, but he backed out and said he would watch it with a friend instead. I don't know if he ever made it to the movie while it was playing here. I still haven't seen it, but I think it's on Netflix now.

His movies spanned genres, and while always somewhat dark, were not all ultra-violent. His biggest success was with his Vengeance trilogy, of which Oldboy was the middle. This trilogy would stretch almost anyone's tolerance for violence, both physical and emotional. I wonder if this was the scale of emotion that ran behind Alan's quiet exterior. He was so hard to read.

College afforded Alan the possibility of being the one who knew more about a topic when he talked with me. That didn't happen very often, given my breadth of trivial knowledge and our nearly 10 year age gap. When he talked about the use of color desaturation in these films, or the phenomenological themes, he was able to teach instead of be taught. This knowledge added a new and stimulating dimension to our relationship.

Hidden in all the tough conversations about his troubles, in all the silly conversations, the mundane comments made as we passed each other in the house, was this new, more adult character to our brotherhood. I mourn the loss of his future, and selfishly what I lost in our future together.

Where are you going?

Alan's Korean was pretty limited. He could ask for grilled meat, water, money, and cigarettes. When he tried to ask where the bathroom was (hwajangshil), he accidentally asked where to find a famous battlefield from the year 660 (Hwangsanbeol).

But when he was little, he did learn a single children's song in Korean.

Little things like this remind me of how Korean we grew up. As American as our household was, we had kimchi at almost every meal. Some of Alan's favorite snacks as a baby were from the Korean grocery store (those little pancakes with red bean paste in the middle, for instance). He loved tteokbokki, soft rice cakes in a spicy chili sauce. He was equally as likely to make Korean ramen noodles with mandu thrown in as he was to make Easy Mac.

In the song, the mountain rabbit's response is that he is going to the mountaintop to get chestnuts to share. It's still hard to believe he's not coming back sometimes.

How to get a tiger to stop smoking

Alan had a thing for tigers. His room had at least four representations of tigers, his favorite being this one:

This scroll represents a saying in Korean "horangi dambaepideon shijeore," or "when the tiger smoked" -- that is to say, a long, long time ago. Alan saw the tiger and its folk art representations as a connection to his Korean heritage. Maybe he wanted to be seen as clever, fierce and proud. We always said Alan was like a cat, not a big striped one, but the quiet self-centered slinky kind. He loved cats, and cats loved him.

You may have noticed there are a lot of tigers in this blog, too -- crouching tigers, tigers we don't have. Maybe it's just a coincidence, or maybe not.

The music for today's entry was the number one song on the charts when I was born, but more to Alan's taste.

Now, for the nerdy neurologists out there (I know at least some of you are reading this blog.), this phrase, "the eye of the tiger," brings up images of T2 hyperintensity with surrounding hypointensity in the globus pallidus, most often seen in a disease now most commonly called pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration (PKAN).

He used to hate it when I would sing along to the chorus, but change the words:

  It's the eye of the tiger on the MRI scan,
  T2 pallidal signal that's bilateral
  And it used to be known as Hallervorden-Spatz Disease
  But it's now got some different names... 'cuz they were Nazis

Come to think of it, everyone seemed to hate it when I did that.

A Fish Out of Water

I've written before about the trip Alan and I took to Korea in 2011, but I didn't elaborate much on what we did there. One very meaningful component of the trip involved visiting several Buddhist temples. Even though we were not raised religious, Alan felt a certain affinity to these places. On earlier trips with Mom and Dad, he had met prominent monks, and was given prayer beads that he wore most of the time.

We went to Donghaksa near Daejeon with our eldest aunt one evening. The beginning of the walk from the parking lot was a paved road with vendors on either side, but as we got closer in, these gave way to a path running along side a calm brook nestled in the trees. There was a sense of calm that clearly spoke to Alan, even though he found the juxtaposition of serene/spiritual/ancient and aggressive/commercial/new amusing.

One symbol that we noticed specifically at this temple, though it was present at many, was the fish. There were many fish windchimes along the bottom of many of the structures. In the instrument tower, there, alongside the drum, the cloud gong, and the bell, there is a giant wooden fish. I wish I had better pictures, but here's one I do have.

The symbolism of the fish is strong in Buddhism. I think there are many ways you can look at it. A fish lives in an environment that would drown most things, but it thrives. Its entire body is powerful muscle. It is covered in scales that glint in the sun like coins. It can swim with the current or against it.

I wonder if Alan was like a fish out of water, powerful and beautiful, but out of his element, and every breath a struggle. If so, I wonder if his soul was looking to return to the calm brook from which it came. Alan did have a way of looking into the water, his mind clearly so far away...

Seoraksan
As we walked around the temple grounds, the monks started to play the drum.

Post by HyungSub Shim.

Knee-deep in Science

In the spring of 2011, Alan and I took a trip to Korea together. Our cousin Sunghoon and his wife were our gracious hosts. On the flight there, we were across the aisle from each other. Alan was next to a couple who had never had Korean food before, and he helped them figure out how to eat everything. I got stuck next to an elderly Chinese man who elbowed me for most of the flight, spoke no English or Korean, and yelled incessantly at the flight attendants whenever he wanted something.

We arrived at their tiny apartment late in the evening, and went out for samgyupsal, grilled pork belly, which was one of Alan's favorite foods. The next couple weeks were a whirlwind of activity, with us touring the east coast, the south coast, and the southeast, as well as Seoul and visiting our aunt in Daejeon. Despite this jam packed schedule, there was plenty of time, especially in the evening and morning when the two of us would talk in our room.

Alan told me about the delay -- his friends would count to ten before expecting a response and getting mad at him or repeating themselves. He had to stop smoking weed while we were there, but he was dismayed to note that he was "only 10% less spacy" clean.

He told me about how hard it was for him to start the day without a cigarette. Despite my wanting him to quit, I would pack the pack a few times, pull out a cigarette, set out an ashtray and lighter by the open window, and then wake him up. This was the only way we could get started each morning.

While we were there, Sunghoon, asked us why you couldn't say, "Oh my f---" in English, which he felt should be the obvious phrase to say for something more intense than "Oh my God." He charged us with trying to get it to take off in the US.

We compared music notes, and found a weird little overlap in Electro swing -- club and dance worthy electronic music with heavy Big Band and swing influence. When Sunghoon played it, we had never heard of it before, but it first grabbed Alan's attention, then mine.

I still can't figure out the words to this track -- Don't have a tiger, we're knee-deep in science?

When I returned (earlier than Alan, who stayed behind), there was a strange emptiness in my life. I remember thinking the world felt hollow back in Chicago. The same sights that brought me joy just didn't do it for me. For ten days, I just lacked my normal contentedness with life. Maybe it was Alan withdrawal. Maybe it was just jet lag. Maybe it was the let-down of ending that trip, full of amazing "Oh my f---" moments shared with my brother, and returning to the real world.