Fifty Pounds of Books

"People in town go inside because the sky weighs too much at noon. They wait for hot food with lots of pepper so the day will feel cooler by comparison. They drink sweet drinks and swallow bitter coffee to distract their insides from the heat and weight of the sky"

-Toni Morrison, Tar Baby-

Everywhere I go, I bring a small library with me. During the summer, especially, I make ambitious reading plans, filling my suitcase and carry-on bag with just enough books to be under the airline's weight limit. This can cause for some heavy bags since I also insist on bringing all seven journals I've filled during college everywhere I go(I trust no one not to read them).

In my most desperate act of book-bringing, I brought a small suitcase filled with fifty pounds of books as my carry-on item when I flew back to Yale for my sophomore year. But, if you take a look at my personal library at Yale--and the wonderfully spacious bookshelves Morse College teased me with--my tactics might seem a little more justifiable.

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Now, I'm not as bad during the summer. But, leisure reading--along with family road trips, vapid pop songs, and sunburn--has always defined summer for me. So, I do usually bring a dozen-or-so books with me and buy three or four more over the course of the summer. True, I've never made it through even half of the books I lug out to wherever I end up, but that never puts a damper on the next year's ambitions.

This summer, I did better than last, plowing through:

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Saidiya Hartman)

(Recommended by a couple past TAs)

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (Ann Brashares)

The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales(Laurel Kendall)

Passing (Nella Larsen)

Flight (Sherman Alexie)

(I got to see him speak in D.C.)

Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America (Elliot Lewis)

(An impulse buy at Busboys and Poets, my favorite D.C. bookstore-restaurant)

Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

(This is the second novel of a Yale African Studies grad student. She was one of my classmates in a seminar last fall, but I didn't know she was a hugely successful author--mainly in the U.K., I think--until I saw this novel on bestseller displays in every bookstore in London)

There's also one book I bring wherever I go: June Jordan's collected essays, Some of Us Did Not Die. If you've never read Jordan, read her now and love her forever. I'll probably be writing my senior thesis(in History and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration) about this poet-professor-activist from U.C. Berkeley. With perfect timing, Harvard just made her personal papers available for research this summer.

Yesterday, on the bus ride out to Suwon to visit my harabu-gee (grandfather)'s mountainside grave, I began what will probably be my final summer read: Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. Along with reading a Jane Austen novel each summer(check), the other great literary quest of my young adulthood is to read all of Toni Morrison's novels in the order in which she wrote them. My relationship with Toni hasn't been as steady as Jane's. During December of my senior year of high school, I read The Bluest Eye and Sula and then Song of Soloman on a flight out to Honolulu the summer after my freshman year at Yale. But, once I've finished Tar Baby, I'll still have half of her oeuvre to get through: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and Love.

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I started off with that passage from Tar Baby because it reminds me so much of Seoul in the summertime(even if Toni's writing about Christmas in the Caribbean) ; and I love those moments when a writer captures my right here, right now.

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Here, too, the summer sky is heavy with rain. In Seoul's crowded streets, women are on constant guard, ready to run for shelter at the first sign of rain, desperate to protect their perfectly made-up faces, their straightened hair(shout out to Aashika). Men and women pack into restaurants to beat the hot, humid afternoons, ordering stamina-boosting dishes like sam gae tang(chicken broth with ginseng) or bo shin tang(dog stew), convinced that they'll sweat out the heat by slurping down these steaming hot stews. And if they can't eat the heat away, they'll head over to airconditioned cafes to sip overpriced coffees, nibble on cookies baked with love, and chat away for hours.

Dreaming of Diaspora

I've just arrived in Korea for four-and-a-half weeks of what I expect to be deeply-draining and deeply-personal field research. On Monday, I'll start meeting with professors, trying to win over NGOs, and wandering around Seoul's migrant neighborhoods and U.S. military camptowns, searching for young adult(ages 18-30ish) mixed-race Koreans to interview. Not American citizens like me, but mixed-race Koreans who were born and raised in Korea, a country that prides itself in its, "unified bloodline."

This ideology of racial purity has produced a society where the few individuals(and by few, I mean an estimated 5000 "Amerasians"-- people of mixed American(primarily white or black) and Korean heritage, and an estimated 30,000 "Kosians" -- people of mixed Korean and other-Asian descent) who deviate from the monoracial norm live in the margins of society, face unrelenting discrimination, and consequentially suffer from many of the problems that plague marginalized minorities across the world: high drop-out rates from schools, large numbers of suicides and attempted suicides, poor emloyment opportunities--not to mention just dealing with the fact that they are one of 35,000 exceptions to a monoracial narrative of nationhood in a country of 50,000,000.

Before studying in Seoul last summer, it had never really occured to me that these 35,000 contradictions to Korea's racial ideology existed. Perhaps the idea had crossed my mind at some point, or I intuitively assumed that there must be people like me in my other motherland, but I had never bothered to find out.

But, arriving in Seoul last June, I landed in the middle of national discussion on race. Two months before my arrival, 2006 Super Bowl MVP, Hines Ward, a football player of Korean and African-American descent, had completed a triumphant tour to the land of his mother. Here, he had been feted by politicians, celebrated by the (notoriously sensationalist) Korean media, and named an honorary citizen of Seoul. Somewhere in this hoopla, cultural commentators coined terms like, the "Hines Ward effect" and "Hines Ward syndrome," to describe Ward's impact on the Korean society, speculating that Ward's celebrity had begun to force a shift in how Koreans think about race.

But, has life for mixed-race Koreans really changed in this Hines Ward era? Well, the Korean government granted legal status to mixed-race Koreans(apparently my existence was illegal in Korea on my previous two visits here...ok, I'm dramatizing a bit) and decided that instead of labeling mixed-race Koreans with the derogatory term honhyol("mixed-blood people"--basically Korea's answer to the Harry Potter series' "mudblood") in government documents, they would start using a new term: "people of international marriages"(so even if you were born in Korea and have spent your entire life here, you're still not Korean...you're a "person of an international marriage"). But, let's be fair, at least these measures are more proactive then deciding that the worst problem mixed-race Koreans face is discrimination from crayon companies

During the two-and-half months I was here, I couldn't stop wondering about these 35,000 Koreans; and thinking about how race importantly—but very differently—impacted both my and their lives compelled me to study race in an academic context. When I returned to Yale last fall, I decided to take Introduction to Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, a class that taught me, among many lessons, how to better articulate my own experiences as a person of mixed racial heritage. And that fall, I began to develop my own plan to take advantage of Yale's generous funding for its students' quixotic projects.

As I was putting this project together and applying for grants, I discussd my plans with several professor and graduate students. Indepedent of each other, two former TAs recommended that I read a new book by Columbia professor, Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. One told me she thought I'd, "appreciate the prose and the approach." The other commented that it was, "a must read for anyone interested in attending to the silences in historical archives and negotiating the tension between memory and history."

I put it on my summer reading list and just finished the last few pages during the near twenty-four hours of flying that brought me back to Seoul.

Hartman's self-described "exercse in literary fieldwork" didn't disapoint, providing me a powerful framework for thinking about and reckoning with histories of trauma, pain, and loss. And, looking back at her prologue during my connecting flight from Tokyo and Seoul, I was struck by the similarities between our motivations and goals.

Hartman writes:

"I had come to Ghana in search of strangers...As both a professor conducting research on slavery and a descendent of the enslaved, I was desperate to reclaim the dead, that is, to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities...I arrived in Ghana intent upon finding the remnants of those who had vanished. It's hard to explain what propels a quixotic mission, or why you miss people you don't even know...The simplest answer is that I wanted to bring the past closer. I wanted to understand how the ordeal of slavery began. I wanted to comprehend how a boy came to be worth three yards of cotton and a bottle of rum or a woman equivalent to a basketful of cowries. I wanted to cross the boundary that seperated kin from stranger."

But, unlike Hartman, who wrote that, "neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana," blood and belonging are exactly what have brought me back to Seoul this summer. My mixed-blood and sense of belonging to those who share it have brought me back here to listen to my peers who share my mixed-blood, hoping that with them, I'll find something I've been missing, that with them, I'll begin to forge a diaspora that's tied to no single ancestral homeland--or, at least, we'll establish some trans-Pacific lines of communication where none existed before.

Where Hartman sought to "reclaim the dead," I seek to find the living, not to "reclaim" them, but simply to hear and share what they have to say. Where Hartman searched for the traces of unrecorded voices of the dead, I am searching for living voices to record.